I have read so many thinkpieces on Lindy West’s memoir and subsequent armchair relationship analyses about its content (not to mention the adjacent thinkpieces on polyamory and the near-universal agreement that her husband is an asshole) that I thought actually reading the book myself would be redundant. I’m glad I read it anyway, though, because there are some interesting details consistently left out of all the thinkpieces, or interpreted in ways completely baffling to me, that make me suspect we’re all using this guy as a proxy to attack some other thing of our choosing.

Adult Braces is, first and foremost, an incredibly uncomfortable read. I wanted to find a way to have a contrarian opinion about all of this, but I just can’t, at least here: the self-loathing is palpable and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her throughout much of it. I personally hate when people feel sorry for me while I’m actively trying to be self-deprecatingly funny, so I hope that’s not what I’m doing to her, but... that's how I read the book.

I was also angry on her behalf more than once. If we take her words at face value — not always easy to do after reading her many admissions of what she omitted from her previous memoirs — she’s been very rudely mistreated throughout her life. A part that sticks out to me as particularly degrading was how the station for her show Shrill, based on her memoir and life and for which she was a writer, sent her series finale gifts to “Linda West,” and included a hard-bound photo book in which she was not included even once. The disrespect she experienced on set was honestly appalling. She is remarkably self-aware about this, though, and does a pretty compelling job retroactively analyzing why she thinks she had such a bad experience on set.

Most people who bother to have a public opinion about this book seem to be, to some degree or another, outraged on West’s behalf. They see her having been manipulated into letting her husband fuck whoever he wants while she’s stuck paying the bills and listening to him have sex with their shared girlfriend she never wanted, surrounded by sad stuffed animals, being tucked into bed like a child (a take I now think was exaggerated and characterized as something much worse or weirder than it was).

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This characterization is an easy one to make because West isn’t shy to admit that she feels and often acts like a child and enjoys being taken care of, because she is depressed and anxious and it feels exhausting to do on her own.

...And this leads to the first mischaracterization I found among The Concerned: the suspicion that her brief mention of having a temporary, vaguely Dominant/submissive dynamic with Aham to help get her out of her personal slump was, in fact, Aham apparently coercing her into a sexual kink she didn’t want, either. Meg Keene writes:

So when she asks for help—maybe he can assist her in picking up the pieces of her own life? Perhaps he can participate in SIMPLE FUCKING TASKS in their marriage like washing the dishes? He agrees! (Wonder of wonders.) But only after he tells her that now they are in a dominant/ submissive relationship and she’s the sub.

She goes on to quote a part of the book where West describes a really simple dynamic where Aham tells Lindy to do the basic shit for herself that she needs to do to be a functioning human every day while he takes care of a bunch of the housework, because she will listen to him, not herself. As West says in the passage just before the one Keene quotes:

In early COVID and early couples’ therapy, when despair was the only color left on my palette, when I was slogging through each day in what I can only describe as “panic, but make it tired,” when the best ten-year plan I could come up with was to get frozen into a glacier, I asked Aham to tell me what to do.

As I struggled through that overwhelming onslaught of days and nights unfortunately called life, with a sharply diminishing grasp on how to navigate money, career, food, body, friendship, marriage, parenting, nonmonogamy, sleeping, being awake, getting older, and, suddenly, a global pandemic, I had nothing left. Why did I have to make all the choices? Couldn’t I outsource that? Abdicate the throne of life to someone who knew me best, who, at least at that point, believed in my potential way more than I did?

Emphasis mine. Why was it left out that she asked him to tell her what to do? It sounds like she literally initiated this arrangement and he was simply happy to agree. Where does the claim come from that he has now unilaterally declared them to be in a D/s situation? Where is this alleged “emotional abuse” she earlier accuses him of? West goes on to describe their setup:

If you are a spiraling control freak, relinquishing control of the minutiae of your life to someone who welcomes that control with horniness feels better than those TikToks where the husband lifts up the wife’s pregnant belly. It wasn’t an instant fix, but it was a step toward trust that provided each of us a legible framework for understanding the other. Life felt like a set of labeled containers rather than a mountain of rotting laundry. I was able to transfer my mental load to Aham, and he was invested in our life in a new way.

Our power dynamic wasn’t particularly lurid. My required daily tasks were essentially all the things I’d been writing on lists titled “LIFE OVERHAUL” or “MANDATORY DAILY SCHEDULE” and then failing to complete for twenty years: wake up at the same time every day, shower, water the garden, write in my journal, work on my book, walk to the beach, eat three solid meals, do something nice. The self-discipline that had felt out of reach was suddenly effortless, because I had handed over authority to someone I actually respected (i.e., not me). Responsibilities that had been asphyxiating last week were now a cute, sexy game.

This may not be the best way for people to routinely or permanently go about managing their own lives, but it’s something she frames as a kind and effective— and temporary— setup she and her husband had, not something good for everyone, and not something she was coerced into. She is literally expresses her gratitude for this dynamic.

Even if I broadly agree with some tenor of the endless book-takes1 when it comes to having compassion for West’s obvious self-esteem issues and the feeling that Aham threatened to abandon her (even though that’s not really how it appeared to go), disordered eating habits, and other mental health issues that have affected her all her life, so many people have such bad book-takes, focusing on what I think are the wrong (or irrelevant) things, and in all the wrong ways.

Besides West’s particular background story leading up to accepting this marriage as it’s structured now, people are predictably using the opportunity to argue why Polyamory is Bad for Everyone. The most annoying of these takes are usually based on a misunderstanding and subsequent flattening of the different types of polyamorous relationships people engage in (and why, and with whom), or a bad personal history with just one (currently trending) kind. Now, I’m no expert, but, consider the following:

Polyamory and polygyny are not synonyms

Polyamory is a broad umbrella under which romantic and sexual partners have permission to also have other romantic and sexual partners. Couples negotiate this permission in many different ways, and it looks different in many cases. I hate to use such a clichéd “um ackshually,” but there are many ways to be “poly.” Polygyny can be one way, but it’s sure not the only way, nor is it the most common among the type of poly PMC liberal elites everyone complains about and blames so many divorces on.

Polygyny is specifically a man with more than one female partner. The female in the polygynous scenario is expected to be involved only with her husband, while he is able to have more than one female partner or wife. Polygyny is most common among certain African and Middle Eastern cultures (and some remote desert towns populated by fundie LDS and portrayed sympathetically on one of my favorite shows, Big Love), not the pale rationalists of Silicon Valley or the non-hierarchical anarchists of Portland or Minneapolis. In those cultures, the women get to do what they want, too.

In West’s marriage, she has also always been able to do what she wants. Of course, she didn’t want any of those options,2 so they were pretty useless to her, but she has them, nonetheless. It was never meant to be an asymmetrical arrangement favoring only Aham, especially when you consider that Roya is polyamorous, as well. If Lindy was interested, she would likely not have a problem hooking up with or dating other men. Women do generally have it easier in poly setups, (yes, even fat women who have more self-confidence than Lindy), although men like Aham predictably clean up.

The distinction between polyamory and polygyny is important, because many people make arguments against polyamory based on an assumption that a douchey cad with some version of a modern harem is actually representative of poly and nonmonogamous relationships as a whole.

What’s funnier to me, though, is that there are basically two camps of people in this category who like to hate on nonmonogamy: those who hate it because they heard stories like West’s and feel bad for the woman, assuming the man manipulated the woman into it, and people who hate it because they know from experience that it’s often easier for women to date outside the relationship than it is for men, which they think is unfair to the man. These complaints usually involve fun words like “cock carousel” or “cuck,” needing someone to blame for the indignity of evolution. I don’t know why we like C-words so much.

Polyamory is not “when struggling monogamous couple opens marriage as last resort”

Another common misconception is that polyamory is when exclusive couples open up their relationships in some way or another, particularly after a long period of monogamy. Of course people do this, but it’s, again, not the way to be poly. Maybe the couple made this decision because someone was unfaithful and they thought this would heal the hurt that the betrayal caused, or prevent it from happening again, or because all their friends were doing it, or because they just read Sex at Dawn,3 or because they’re just bored and open-minded and want to see if it helps “keep the spark alive” or whatever.

Admittedly, Sex at Dawn ran rampant in my friend group after it came out, too, and yes, about half of them became poly, most people broke up (although not all), and my divorce from my first husband shortly after can be at least partially blamed on my being influenced by the book, although it would have happened anyway.4

People who disapprove of this practice, though, even rightfully, tend to start from this and make their arguments from there, excluding from their analysis any information about people who begin their open relationships in this manner, with the expectations of how it will work laid out up front, with people already used to doing this. Of course, the polyamorous or other poly or open relationships that start out that way are much more likely to succeed than whatever trashfire your monogamous friends decided to engage in because they thought it looked cool and enlightened.

As far as Lindy and Aham are concerned, they did not “open up” their monogamous relationship. He broke up with her, then they got back together later, under different terms. That is emphatically not the same as demanding your wife let you have a girlfriend eight years into your marriage.

Consensual nonmonogamy is, by definition, not cheating

Have you ever been cheated on? What is it that upset you so much about it? Was it only about what they did, or the fact that they did it after explicitly agreeing not to, and then tried to keep it a secret from you? My guess is it’s not just one thing, and it’s a lot more of the latter than we tend to give it credit for in these conversations. The breach of trust is the primary problem that the others stem from when someone cheats; there is no issue with trust if everyone is honest and agrees to the terms beforehand. It’s removed from the equation because it becomes easier to assume. But many people have a hard time believing this can be true for anyone else. Take this conversation in the comments of ’s recent article on polyamory below:

First, Mjau thinks active secret betrayal is better than honesty from the jump. Adam, however, thinks successful cheating and honesty from the jump are literally the same thing, implying that being “mindful of the feelings of their partner” can’t possibly include a mutual desire for this relationship style or the radical honesty it requires.

What makes polyamory different from cheating is, obviously, the permission and the honesty. It’s why all the communication jokes exist: you have to be willing and able to talk things through in order to ensure you are not being unintentionally dishonest with one another. Yes, it’s complicated, but it’s necessary if you want to live that lifestyle.

Lindy and Aham did not communicate, as much as Aham tried. Lindy explains how she went out of her way to avoid talking about it, deliberately willing herself to believe that his desire for polyamory was “theoretical” rather than real, agreeing to it but refusing to believe he meant it, hoping that she would never have to confront it again. When Aham did bring it up — frequently enough, according to Lindy — she would shoot him Looks and emotionally punish him in various ways for continuing to be exactly the person he told her he was in the beginning.

Make fun of all the communication as much as you want; for a lot of people, this isn’t a bug, but a feature. The thing about “incessant” communication is that, if done sincerely and with care, you always know what’s going on and you are able to set realistic expectations for yourself and others, and boundaries, appropriately. You are able to make informed decisions. You know where you stand, at all times. According to Lindy, it was she who refused communication and the honesty it required, not Aham.

Everyone is not as jealous as you are

Polyamorous people do seemingly feel less intense jealousy than strictly monogamous people as a whole, which makes this all much easier for them than it is for a freshly-open couple who is coming off of a decade or more of exclusivity with each other. It also makes it much easier for some people than others!

Jealousy is a normal human emotion, and as far as emotions go, it’s about my least favorite one to feel, and the immediate revulsion normies have to polyamory makes sense when you consider how most people feel about the idea of “sharing” their partner with someone else.

But everyone is not the kind of normie whose jealousy is great enough to overcome their desire, or seeming need, to live such a lifestyle. For them, it’s easy enough to train yourself out of some common jealous feelings or behaviors that are irrational or meaningless.

“If you have to train yourself to stop feeling a normal emotion, that’s a sign there’s something wrong.”

Disagree. First, normal emotions aren’t always rational in the context in which they’re felt. Training yourself out of “jealousy” is really shorthand for training yourself out of certain irrational reasons for jealous feelings, and learning how to tell the difference, and not to ruminate or try to control other people.

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What people forget— critics and temporary monogamous converts alike— is that polyamory is not just a way to organize a relationship, it’s often based on a larger philosophy on how to live. Aham explains this to her when they initially negotiate their relationship after they consider getting back together after their first breakup:

In broaching nonmonogamy, Aham said that he wasn’t seeing anyone else, and this wasn’t about me—it was just a fundamental part of his ethos. He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.

If that’s not a philosophy you feel drawn or at least sympathetic toward, polyamory might not be right for you, or worth trying!

It’s also worth noting the infamous passage that comes right after that where Lindy surmises that perhaps she’s too white to get it:

I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.

Cringe AF but I don’t know that we can say by this sentence alone that she’s doing anything other than bathing herself in white guilt all on her own, but sure, maybe Aham could have pressured her into believing this. But she doesn’t really tell us as much in the actual book! It reads like it is her own original thought.

Related:

Aham wasn’t the liar or manipulator in this situation

From Lindy’s own mouth/fingers, she was.

If I’m being really honest, I was engineering my backup plan: a total system collapse that I could blame on polyamory.

This is after we’ve already learned that she effectively shut him out every time he tried to be communicative about the structure of their relationship, and how she steadfastly avoided all mention of and conversation about it for eight entire years.

She also admits that she was punishing him when it finally came out that he was exactly who he said he was after the fan sent her the DM telling her that her husband was doing what polyamorous people in polyamorous relationships do sometimes— only, the fan didn’t know about the poly part because Lindy made sure it was a secret so that he would look like a cheater.

Maybe I feel some sympathy for Aham, the world’s current favorite villain, because I can relate. In a previous life, I was an outlier in that, probably as a result of feeling allergic to the idea of a “poly community” when I was interested in that kind of relationship, I did not know many other people I wanted to date who were also open to the idea of a more open relationship, so I was the rare woman out there trying to convince various monogamous men that some degree of openness was a good idea, sometimes to disastrous results. When we were on the same page and it worked, it worked well, but when it didn’t, it really sucked, and you learn that people should not be converted into such a lifestyle. If it doesn’t appeal to them, it’s not going to.

Aham tried to be honest from the beginning, after two failed marriages. West says outright, if not overly-apologetically, that she pushed him too fast into a relationship after his second divorce, and they ended up breaking up after a fairly short time. And, unlike many of the portrayals of this part of West’s story, the polyamory ultimatum was given to her after this breakup when they reunited in grief over her father’s death. He did not demand his partner become polyamorous or he would leave her.

If you read the book, it is weird to claim that’s what happened when it clearly says something else happened! An absolutely terrible time for West as it is, but also, he laid it out there before they could go any further and hurt her more, in order to be honest with her, and kept opening up the topic for conversation only to be stonewalled in response. He was giving her the ability to make an informed decision before she agreed to get back together with him. This was not a situation where he sprung polyamory on a desperate wife— they had barely known each other a year and weren’t even dating anymore! She explains it all right there in the book:

My life with Aham started out a mess. It was the first few weeks of 2011. He had just gotten divorced, but I fell in love right away. I pushed him. He wanted it—if there’s one impressive/excruciating thing about Aham, it’s that he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do—but I know I pushed too hard, even as he was begging me not to. We moved in together and to another state within a year, a stupid, selfish move that hurt our families and took me away from my father in the last months of his life. It was too soon and I wanted it too much and we never got our rhythm back. A month after we moved, Aham broke up with me.

I think this is a severely overlooked part of this entire story. Critics cite this as evidence that he was a womanizer, already looking for wife number three to emotionally abuse, but it was in fact West herself that pushed him further than he openly said he wanted to go, too quickly, and then he predictably backed away. We don’t know how long they were apart before Lindy’s dad died and he came back to help her through her grief, but that’s when the negotiations for getting back together, not staying in an existing marriage or even LTR, began.

West says,

Aham always knew he wanted an unconventional relationship structure; I still felt safe in the tightness of jealousy. I’m not politically conservative, but I am reserved.

As we all know now, she hates the idea. Absolutely cannot stand it. But she agrees, anyway, albeit hesitantly and with her fingers in her ears.

As noted in the book passage in the image above, immediately after the oft-quoted passage meant to cast suspicion on the character of Aham for his poor timing, West goes on to explain how she literally just tricked herself into thinking she could change him, and then she went on to manipulate the situation to ensure he looked like the bad guy if he were caught in public acting on what she gave him permission to do. Her pain and desperation is understandable, here; it’s the casting of Aham as the villain for bringing it up that I find objectionable. Although, to be fair, he could have told her they weren’t discussing getting back together until a few weeks had passed, allowing her to more thoroughly process her emotions, and they’d talked about what he needed for that to happen.

But still.

Where the poly critics are right

Monogamous couples should probably not open up their marriages! The only time I’d say “go for it” is if the relationship is about to die a fiery death, anyway, and this is their last remaining option and there’s a good reason for them to stay together, like they have kids or something (yes, I think you can be some version of poly and still raise kids healthily. You don’t need to have your entire cast of fuck buddies living in your basement or even introduce them to your children; there is no reason to believe this would be the common reality for anyone approaching some kind of open arrangement with any care).

But everyone else should probably leave it alone and stick to what they know, because people are going to be way more jealous than they think, probably jump in too fast without really knowing what they want, someone will be more hesitant, someone more successful, more disappointed, suddenly in love with their new boyfriend/girlfriend, whatever. There are probably better solutions to “fixing” your relationship. Sometimes even ending it.

This shit is not for everyone, and I think the primary reason is fairly obvious: most people are too jealous, whether you’re talking about multiple entire relationships, the much-maligned throuple like West’s, or just a “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement that Lindy and Aham had in the beginning. And that’s fine. It seems pretty damn normal that it’s not fitting for everyone when you consider how easily most people accept monogamy and can’t fathom the idea of any level of nonmonogamy, even theoretically.

Speaking of which,

It’s okay to just quietly be a little weird

The age of normalizing shit is over. We are done now. We pronounced that dead sometime around November ‘24. We’re getting rid of normalizing and re-embracing our old friend, tolerance. No one needs to celebrate polyamory unless they want to. They don’t need to embrace it or think the people involved are cool for it. They just have to let people be who they are, as long as they’re not hurting anyone.

But are they hurting anyone, though?

I’m pretty sure at least part of the reason why so many people with brand-new or freshly-public negative opinions about polyamory hate it so much is because the people who are actually successful at it aren’t their friends, and they don’t know them. Those folks hang out with each other, not usually many monogamous people, and not people in unhappy monogamous marriages in which the husband tries to convince his sad and reluctant wife to let him fuck younger, skinnier women and it all goes predictably up in flames.

People who are committed to living this lifestyle publicly typically keep their dating lives to themselves, which I guess sounds contradictory, but really isn’t. They’re not going to hide it, but most who are hardcore into the lifestyle for more ethical reasons aren’t trying to convert normies. The ones everyone’s got an opinion about right now are the asshole men with the sad wives, but they’re conflating them with the poly commune folks and swinging couples who don’t care what anyone else does.

Besides being annoying as fuck, the surge of newbies into any fringe group that infects the mainstream can, usually by way of elite culture essays in fancy mags, in certain contexts, cause real problems. Testimony from and about their monogamous friends opening up their marriages to utter disaster come to mind. KryptoGal wrote a note about it:

And Kitten describes his own experiences watching his friends go down the same spiral:

In the early 2010s a polyamory fad swept through my social scene like crack through a black ghetto. No marriage or long-term relationship that dabbled in ethical-non-monogamy survived the decade. Many didn’t survive the year. The relationships opened up, then fell apart. Children of these couples were made to adapt to a rotating cast of new partners coming in and out of their lives, to mom or dad being absent with lovers on evenings or weekends, and then finally to parents who didn’t live together anymore.

There are countless stories like theirs, and there are many “formerly poly” people on Substack who’ve weighed in pretty evenly on the topic (hello). But it can’t be denied that this way of doing it usually ends in disaster.

Now, hear me out, but people make the same kinds of arguments against trans youth medicine. It’s not like experimenting with being gay by making out with or dating someone for a couple months before deciding, yeah, turns out you’re still straight, where no one is negatively impacted by the experience. On the other hand, if “experimenting” with one’s gender includes the permanent effects of hormones or even irreversible surgeries, it’s more worrisome to more people to allow simple “experimentation” if it goes beyond the social sphere, and more gatekeeping is often desired, and actually possible through regulatory measures restricting medical and surgical options to certain ages and other psychological factors ensuring it’s the right treatment for the patient.

But how do you do that with polyamory? If you are really afraid it’s going to ruin marriages across the country (and probably further destroy the birth rate, because why not throw that in there), what would you have us do? Kitten’s response in the comments of his article aren’t terribly objectionable, although I’m much less disgusted by the whole thing, myself, and wouldn’t really compare polyamory to meth:

Is polyamory an “infohazard” and therefore actually hurting uninvolved people?

Is it too influential an idea to the people in their social circles, most of whom are probably not suited for the practice? Well, I hate the idea of infohazards on principle, first of all. It’s so insulting to assume we’re too mentally ill-equipped to handle seeing something like poly couples without hastily adopting the practice ourselves with no critical thought or consideration for existing relationships. But unfortunately, the idea that humanity is actually as intelligent as I want everyone to assume of one another is a utopian pipe dream, so, I hate to admit it, but there’s probably something to the infohazard idea.

There probably is merit to the idea that certain types of ostensibly private “degeneracy” should be kept reasonably taboo (but still legal) in polite society, but that there is a thriving “alternative” fringe of people who are tolerated as such by said polite society as long as they don’t go around giving the kids bad ideas or something. Everyone mostly just keeps within their circles that already broadly agree on how their particular alternative lifestyles all work.5 You know, like the olden days, but less violently repressive, because violent repression eventually leads to situations where everyone is suddenly trying to be queer poly communists.

But also, there are a whole lot of couples that are just discreet about their various nonmonogamous “agreements” that you’re not hearing from, because that’s what discreet means. They don’t tell everyone about their personal relationship details except maybe a few close, open-minded friends. They don’t write out of touch NYT op-eds from Manhattan penthouses or even Substack articles or even know what Substack is. They are private and otherwise “normal” from the outside; they just have an unconventional private relationship that works for them and they don’t really need to tell anyone about it, or justify it to you, you nosy weirdos.

I suspect that people might not be so mad at polyamory as much as they’re mad at some loud freaks they see on the internet, or the irresponsibility with which people they know changed the foundations of their existing relationships like it was an easy fad based on the lives of those internet freaks. But the people who fall under this oft-maligned umbrella are a wide variety of people with a wide variety of practices that don’t threaten anyone and don’t really make sense to hate so rabidly if you can take the time to separate them by type.

Anyway, going back to being weird, the thing about being a weird outlier in some way is that it’s fun. A little secret degeneracy in one’s life can be a good thing for some people, to a point. But degeneracy is not, by definition, normal, so the bar to clear is growing ever higher with each thing we normalize. Stop normalizing: make degeneracy easier and more fun again.

My ultimate verdict on this story is that it’s painfully clear that Lindy West’s self-esteem is in the toilet, and I don’t think she was trying to hide that. My unsolicited guess is that she probably agreed to this not because she felt any initial pull toward polyamory (or Roya), but because she conveniently stopped hating the idea6 and didn’t want to lose her husband, who was her most prized claim to the life she always wanted but always felt was out of reach; and also, sorry to say, her husband actually sounds a lot more honest than people are giving him credit for, although he also sounds like an immature, self-involved dork online. That said, I might, too, if my wife wrote a book explaining how she lied to me about what she wanted in our marriage and plotted for years to ruin my reputation, then the public made me out to be the asshole.

The book was often painful to read because of how desperately honest she was about how much she disliked herself, and the sad stories she had about men and dating and being bullied for being fat, and you can’t help but sympathize with her for how hard it’s all been for her. She was basically a femcel most of her life before we even made that word a thing. I also admire that kind of honesty, even when I get the dreaded secondhand embarrassment about it.

Also, the road trip seemed like a lot of fun, and it sounded like it really helped her in a lot of ways, not just with her marriage.

Maybe their relationship won’t work out, and maybe we’ll see a divorce memoir with more omissions from this one admitted in it, I don’t know. Maybe there is something inherently fucked up about their particular situation. I also don’t know that, and I really can’t! I am just going to trust that she probably is happy with her choices, at least now like she says, and that she doesn’t really owe anyone else an explanation for that. Or for her choice in husband (or girlfriend).

Tip Jar

It’s been a good two and half years or so of consistent1 writing for me here on Substack, and there are some essays that haunt me at night because I now believe that they are fucking terrible for one reason or another. I always tell myself I’ll go in and rework them, and sometimes I change a thing here or there if I link to it and remember, and rarely, but sometimes, I just unpublish something, but mostly I don’t do any of that and it just stays up looking dumb. So here are some essays I’ve written that are still up that I hate now.

This is my most popular essay currently, and I hate it because I was trying to be blunt and kind of funny, but I feel like I was just annoying about it. I still agree with my overall reasoning about why so many women like the “before” pic better, but I don’t know what I was trying to prove here with the way I was talking. “I can be as brash as everyone else!” Well, sure, but also, I don’t have to be. Or I could’ve done it better. And there were other points to consider that I ended up leaving out that I wish I had added to make a clearer or better-sounding argument, but that’s the price you pay for playing the Current Thing game where it’s a race to publish your take before the topic becomes irrelevant. Let that be a lesson to me!

I actually used to write that way all the time, but better, mostly about politics and news. I think I was better at it for a few reasons: I was writing opinion pieces about politics, especially Minnesota state politics, and other news. Something happens every day that you can write about if this is your beat. It’s not hard to come up with an opinion on something nutty Michele Bachmann said. As a result, I didn’t hold myself to any kind of word count standard. When I was done talking, I was done, and I didn’t feel the need to overly-edit like I do now. I published shorter essays all the time and was much more concise. I also had a smaller audience then, and that probably makes a difference. There are things I both like and dislike about the changes over the years in my public writing style. I am still kind of experimenting with it.

This one was one of those that shouldn’t have even ended up being seen as much as it was because I didn’t even email it. I just ranted on my phone from bed in the dark early one morning and hit publish. I feel like everyone has a surprise hit essay like that at some point, for better or worse. Anyway, the reason I don’t like it anymore is because I was ultimately just rehashing old personal drama in it, and due to that and the fact that it was all inspired by something really Notes-specific, I didn’t feel like my email-only subscribers would care about it, which is why I only shared it on Notes.

But then everyone liked it. So, you know, I was conflicted because I didn’t want to look so petty to increasingly more people by airing dirty laundry like that, however blurred the names were in the screenshots, but also, I like when things I write become popular, so I didn’t really want to unpublish it, so I did the next best thing and paywalled it. That slowed the flow of views and earned me quite a few new paid and free subscribers. But those heated topics always do well and that shouldn’t be so surprising. It just made me slightly more calculating.

I don’t disagree with anything I said in this essay and it was a lot of fun to write it (and finally watch the show for the first time), but my god, it was so horribly written I’m just embarrassed. I want to rewrite the whole thing, but that sounds so tedious. Anyway, Tony is not alluring, stop it.

I wrote this because everyone else was talking about it and it seemed like an argument that made sense to make out loud, and I didn’t change my mind about what seems to make sense, but the point is that I’ll never truly know if it really makes sense because I haven’t used a dating app in over a decade and I therefore have no business writing about them. But my point that women getting easier access to sex does not necessarily have the same meaning for her that it might for a man remains true, app or no app! I’m not going to write about the apps anymore, though, unless it’s to do one of those “you kids just need to get off those damn apps and meet people IRL” asides that I know everyone loves to get from married Millennials and no one rolls their eyes about at all.

This is a weird one, because I wouldn’t say I actually hate it or regret writing it or anything, and I think I made some good arguments and hashed out some differences that made sense, but: I somehow hardly remember writing it at all. It is as though it were birthed into existence while under some sort of alien trance or something, the intergalactic powers taking over my fingers and brain. Also I feel like it’s just poorly-organized. Was I on drugs? Was that the night I did too many mushrooms and an essay came out? Was the weed laced? I may never know. This essay continues to befuddle me.

This one just could have been so much funnier, and I don’t know why I couldn’t make it that way. It’s a hilarious story but everyone I tell it to just looks at me with sadness instead of laughing. I thought you would be different, Substack. But anyway, I promise I do not think of this as some kind of traumatic story. You can laugh. Or maybe I need to get better at being funny about pee.

Can’t wait to see which current articles I hate in another two and a half years! Or next month.

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This feels crazy for me to admit out loud, but I still don’t know exactly wtf Gamergate was really about.1 I thought it was basically that a bunch of feminists were publicly angry at what they saw as sexist depictions of women in many video games, as well as sexist treatment on forums or voice channels, and male gamers were annoyed with the feminists for feeling that way, and then that feud went on for a very confusingly long time. And because that’s all I really knew about it, I really couldn’t see why it was such a lingering battle in The Gender Wars. But then I learned that it all went so much deeper than that, and subsequently lost interest because I cannot bring myself to care about anything even tangentially gaming-related enough — even if it is about my lifelong frenemy, The Gender Wars — to go through the whole archive of the scandal’s chronology. Yes, it’s been explained to me. No, I don’t remember many of the details. Was this the one that also involved the hotel Elevator Guy? Is he the same as the Coffee Guy? Was Bad Space Shirt Guy a part of this, or was he part of a totally separate unwarranted controversy? I can’t keep this shit straight.

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I am a very casual kind of “gamer,” myself,2 and while I don’t mean that in the Candy Crush way, I do mean that I have pretty much only played some version of the same five video games since I was eight and I get bored of anything else after about ten minutes. I default to the Super Mario Bros universe (no, not the fighting one) or Tetris if I’m in a video game mood, with the occasional exception of a random fun-looking odd game I might buy on a whim and get obsessed with for a month or three.3 But I’m pretty sure WASD will forever remain a physical impossibility to me, and my video game console controller muscle memory maxed out at Nintendo, the first and only console type I’ve ever personally owned.

Faking stuff is really hard sometimes, though

So anyway, I always think it’s interesting when women are accused of only being into something to impress dudes, because I don’t think I’ve ever really had the patience for that. The idea of intentionally suffering through some kind of first person shooter or WoW game just so a guy will think I’m cool sounds like pure torture, honestly. I’ve given various games good college tries once in a while to try to be a good sport, but it never sticks. I tried to like professional wrestling for a boy once in high school and barely got through it intact. One guy was really into cars and after I learned, like, two new related vocabulary words, I was done. I just can’t, man.

I feel like you’ve gotta have at least some pre-existing interest in the thing, or type of thing, if you’re going to be able to actually stick with fake-liking it just to impress a dude, and if that’s the case, can you really be considered “faking it” anymore? Maybe you’re not a hardcore fan, but you aren’t like the Zoomer in the Nirvana shirt who doesn’t know any of their songs.

That said, I realized I am no stranger to this broader phenomenon, in more than one way. Just after I got done feeling smugly assured that I was not a dreaded “liking things to impress the boys” kinda gal, I remembered how I actually kind of was that person when I was younger, and also mean about other girls who I assumed were that way, themselves.

I joined the school band as soon as I was old enough, which was fourth grade. I played the clarinet throughout elementary school and then again in high school. It was fun. It was not fun enough that I stayed in band after ninth grade, but it was fun. I loved music and I liked the way it felt to play music, but I wasn’t like, passionate about it. This may have totally been because I thought the clarinet was too boring and it was hard to switch instruments in an established band,4 and I didn’t see any other path I cared to pursue with it, so I just didn’t.

I kept lazily trying to be a musician in other ways, though. When I was 14, I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I got an acoustic one for my 15th birthday. I learned a few chords, but I didn’t have much drive to teach myself and started focusing on other things. When I was 20, my boyfriend showed me some things on his bass, and I decided I wanted to learn that, instead. Knowing how I was with trying to teach myself the guitar, I started taking bass lessons from a bass player from one of my favorite local bands. I got regrettable tattoos about it that force me to have to still tell people “no, not really, I guess before, a little, not really anymore though, anyway, it’s warm for February, isn’t it” when they ask with interest if I’m a musician.5

And that’s when I entered my own version of “they think I’m only doing this because I want to impress the boys” hell.

The thing is, I don’t actually remember any specific criticism I got personally, and it makes me wonder if it may not have even happened at all (to my face, anyway). But I do remember very clearly how much I did not want to come off like that to anyone else. Especially an actual musician, the primary kind of guy I was hanging around with back then and did want to impress. My lack of memory of it actually happening to me is not to say that sort of thing didn’t happen at all, though, and I know that because I was totally that person who helped it happen to other women, at least back then before my prefrontal cortex had fully developed.

It was really easy to do with this one bass player in the music scene back then. She was a gorgeous blonde with noticeable enhancements and also a stripper who was dating the drummer of the band she played in. With that combination of qualities going for her, she didn’t stand a chance in hell of avoiding nasty rumors, some of them easily picked up and perpetuated by people like me who wanted to deflect attention away from the very qualities of my own — or that I was afraid of having — that I was criticizing her for possessing. Very projection of me.

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There was an insidious rumor (I didn’t start it!) about how the band would turn down her amp so that the audience wouldn’t be able to tell that she couldn’t actually play the bass. She had insanely long fake nails, so us petty dorks in the audience would cackle to ourselves about how she obviously couldn’t play properly with such fingernails, and how lame it was that such an otherwise good band would only let her play because she was hot and also the drummer’s girlfriend. Surely those were the only reasons.

Well, I eventually became pretty good friends with the vocalist in that band and ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them in their practice space, and I wildly embarrassed myself by making fun of this bass player, who was not there that night, and he nicely but pointedly told me I was wrong about her, and that no, of course they didn’t turn down her damn amp, and it was pretty unfair that people had such opinions about her — especially so many women.

Ope. I felt like an absolute asshole (I was).

What I’m also getting at here, besides the fact that I just remembered I was a huge bitch in 2005, is that I didn’t really care about the bass all that much, especially not enough to put in the effort to be in a band like that. I liked music and always had, I used my years of intermittent clarinet- and guitar-playing as constant proof of my “authenticity” (resume above), I really did know how to read music and tablature which made me feel like I had earned at least some of it.

But I think that where my experience, and probably many others, differs is that I didn’t necessarily want to impress the boys in a romantic way first; I wanted to be like them. I idolized these guys in a way, and wanted the same kind of creative, spontaneous, crazy lives and talent that they had. I saw how most of the women involved in this scene were usually merch girls or, like me, photographers, looking like unambitious accessories, and while I did love the photography aspect and the merch girls were my friends, I really just wanted to “be a musician,” like the guys and the few cool girls who were in that scene.6 Not because I was great at it or had a particular passion for really creating it, but because it seemed really cool. And the musicians got a lot more respect than the merch girls. So did photographers, so I tried to always be known for that, at least, but there was a constant air of wanting to be taken more seriously among us women in that scene, and it was hard to deny that it was because we weren’t doing anything particularly impressive, at least noticeably. So many of us tried.

So I’m not sure if I was really “faking it” when it came to my interest in playing bass, per se, and/or if that’s what most young women are doing when they pick up a hobby like gaming or something else that’s stereotypically male but that they’re already at least mildly interested in, and seeing an opening to learn more about it and maybe impress people by unconventionally excelling at it.

But I do think that this desire can be rooted in a kind of competition. The standard kind of need to prove I was “just as good” as guys were at whatever thing. I hated that I wanted to play bass, specifically, because it was already associated with women7 because it was easier to play than a regular guitar. I hated that it would not be assumed that I played it because I had a special affinity for the instrument (I did really like it, but I also stuck with it more than guitar... because it was easier8).

The account says above that:

I’m not trying to say that misogyny doesn’t play a role (it clearly does!) But I also think it is unhelpful to always explain away male hostility to women as “just misogyny”. Even if their behavior is ultimately misogynistic, it is often a misogynistic response to a specific cultural dynamic. And understanding that dynamic is as crucial as understanding the response.

While trying to impress a guy romantically is probably also a tangential benefit or (un)conscious secondary goal in adopting more “male” hobbies, it’s probably also about gaining the respect that being a female who can authentically compete or even participate at the male level can bring.

It’s often said that men just don’t want to compete with women in the same way they want to compete with other men in the workplace or elsewhere where stakes are high, and that's extrapolated to male flight in various industries, and I can see that in plenty of cases, and I can also see how women might not really want that, either, but sometimes we end up feeling like we have to, anyway, even in low-stakes situations like hobbies. Because no matter how many HR ladies censor your speech, regular people still don't actually trust women with seemingly anything anymore. Least and weirdly of all, our own desires.

Being a girl who's good at Boy Stuff is so alluring that we have entire movie and fiction tropes dedicated to it that will never die. We all know the one about the hot chick who drinks beer and knows how to change a flat tire in a miniskirt and isn’t afraid to get dirty because she was raised by a single dad and twelve older brothers or whatever.

But while the chatter about sex differences has gone completely off the rails in recent years, it’s funny where the two camps of the fairest-minded of the feminists and the evo-psych people can meet, which is the fact that “success” is not male or female, but often different and complementary, and that’s fine and necessary, and so are outliers, and maybe the second wave had us overcompensating, trying to compete too much on a man’s turfs rather than perfecting our own and forging new paths.

But anyway, competition with men. That’s what I think it’s about, a lot of times. Impressing them, too, but not always in a straightforwardly romantic or sexual way. In an “I want respect” kind of way. And when it doesn’t come naturally to us because we don’t really like it that much, like professional wresting or FPS games, or because it’s fine but we’re not as passionate about it, like playing the bass, we get judged harder and look dumber to everyone else, and all the other girls resent you for it because it only makes them look bad by association. Tale as old as time, really.

I dunno, I’m wrong all the time about how common my experiences are, apparently, but those notes got me thinking about it, so that’s my take.

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2020 broke a lot of people’s brains. Mine, not so much, but that’s because I was busy dealing with other shit. Covid was like the annoying fly making noise in the background of the chaos of my life during that year, and George Floyd being killed and the subsequent protests and riots in my hometown afterwards, which I watched on TV and on Facebook livestreams from my apartment in Northern Virginia with great interest, was certainly a cultural turning point. But as far as how it affected me personally, it really did not change much. I was already long past the childish stage of wanting to abolish or “defund” police, whatever we were supposed to believe the latter meant on any given day, but I was still in the perfectly reasonable “why do you guys have to keep killing people when it’s clear they posed no real threat to you” camp.

And while I was quite pissed off to see so many good and familiar institutions of my life burn to the ground along with actual apartments and other various crazy things during the riots, I frankly didn’t much care about that police station going down in flames. I laughed my ass off watching it, if I’m being honest. Hard to see having any other reaction to witnessing such a thing. I did the same thing when Trump won the first time. Maybe I’m one of those inappropriate insensitive laughter people, I don’t know.

Anyway, someone quickly came up with a cheerful graphic to put on all manner of merch, and I downloaded it, intending to make pyrography art with it.

I never did finish it. Maybe someday.

Anyway, this isn’t an essay about the Summer of Floyd. I didn’t agree with all the Covid restrictions and rules, either, or the bonkers-ass vax mandates and subsequent debates that followed, but this also isn’t really about Covid.

By 2020, I’d stopped calling myself an anarchist and settled into being a heterodox, politically homeless, disaffected IDW liberal or whatever they were calling us then. I was excited about Andrew Yang and while I knew he stood no chance, I actually donated real American dollars to his campaign, definitely not a thing I’d usually do with any other dumb lesser-evil politician I voted for in the past, and became one of those obnoxious people who would go around spreading the Good Word of the Yang Gang to anyone who would listen.

I was very disappointed that he dropped out before I could vote for him in the primaries. Instead, I voted for Bernie, like I did four years prior.

Fast-forward to now, where my husband and I email each other throughout the day when he’s at work, and a lot of what he talks to me about is related to US politics and world news. It’s the nature of his job and his office has news from many sources on various TVs all the time. He’s surrounded. So I told him about ’s recent essay about why she’s not a Republican, and I laughed about how people really think that simply not being a crime-enjoyer should be enough to turn liberals into conservatives. It should also be noted that my husband has been trying to soft-sell me on Trump for like six years now, an entirely fruitless quest, but he’s persistent. He responded saying that a lot of people think they’re left-wing, but when you investigate their views more deeply, you realize they really should be voting Republican.

It gave me kind of a complex for a minute, and all you fuckers out there helped by insisting that women don’t know shit about ourselves or what we want, that we have no solid or concrete ideas, no actual political beliefs or values outside of babies and families, and those we do have are held loosely, based on those of our boyfriends or husbands because we are but naïve and impressionable creatures, not much more agentic than a child of ten or so, only with boobs and pubic hair (hot). Patently absurd bullshit that I know is obviously not true for me and just about any woman I regularly interact with, but man, these things will get into your head, if only because you’re torturing yourself trying to come up with a way to defend yourself against completely unfalsifiable arguments.

Sidenote: this is a fucking pointless activity that will only drive you batshit crazy and make you find yourself beginning to hate men in the same way the “feminist” bitches you make fun of all the time hate men, and you’ve got a confusing and ever-changing reputation to uphold, remember? So you have to stop trying. Just don’t bother. Don’t let them turn you into that.

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Anyway. What else do you do when faced with the passive-aggressive suggestion that you are actually too female to know your own political values?

Ask the fucking robot.

ChatGPT and I had quite a lengthy conversation about what kind of person I am and where I fall on the political spectrum.

It followed my instructions and I answered its questions. It ultimately declared me to be a “classical liberal / civil-libertarian liberal,” which it described as:

Maximum speech rights, skepticism of concentrated power (state and corporate), procedural democracy, strong rule of law, and a bias toward individual autonomy. You’re not libertarian in the “markets solve everything” sense; you’re libertarian on civil liberties.

It kept probing for more details and I eventually got tired of it and went off to do something else for a week, satisfied that it confirmed what I already knew to be true about myself, but I came back to it yesterday to remind myself which qualifiers it had given my liberalness and got sucked back in. After a series of even more clarifying questions about more topics, it amended its original declaration to “civil-libertarian social democrat”:

You want big, simple guarantees (UBI vibe; national floors for healthcare access, utilities + internet, transportation), public options, and meaningful labor power (unions/co-ops). But you also want maximum speech freedom, you’re anti-theocracy, and you want public safety enforced by law. That combination is very “social democratic on material basics, liberal/libertarian on civil liberties.”

Cue more clarifying UBI questions and slightly altered labeling, which now had me at “civil-libertarian social liberal” because I would be willing to cut or reduce other programs if a UBI were implemented on the national level. Then we argued a little about whether or not public options as a remedy to government corruption made any damn sense at all, and then I regained my dignity and stopped arguing with the non-sentient LLM and we got on with some more questions about things like drug legalization and decriminalization, whether social media should be considered publishers, stuff like that.

Your subtype, in plain terms, is something like: anti-capture pluralist liberal (civil-libertarian, pro-universal floor, pro-competition), with an “anti-fragile” strategy mindset. The essence is: don’t bet the whole society on one institution behaving well.

It was at this point that the thing started getting extra click-baitey and I was getting fed up with it, so I told it to just label me, already.

“Civil-libertarian public-option liberal.” Cool. Unsurprising. Just as I’d suspected.

But then I remembered that we never talked about immigration, and that's quite relevant, so I sighed and went back in. Now I’m a “civil-libertarian civic-nationalist liberal.”

Well, this is all fine and good and pretty much just different ways of saying what I’ve been saying all along, which is that, despite my favorite issues to publicly hate on being rooted firmly in the left’s camp, I’m still just a boring-ass normie liberal who skews libertarian on many issues and really likes free speech and hates weaponized identity politics.

But, see, and this is why these comments about women not knowing what they want or believe or whatever always trigger me so hard, I actually do have a lot of seemingly contradictory views about some things. This is not a new or disturbing revelation to me, nor is it news to any of the former friends who have felt personally betrayed upon learning the banal ways in which I slightly disagree with them about things that don’t matter, but it is a source of annoyance for me, even if I am also happy with myself for prioritizing my own values in the face of unprincipled political chaos where nothing means anything anymore and no one cares.

I am not personally confused about these “contradictions” because they are all pretty well aligned if you boil down every issue to its primary principle, and I know my views are actually quite consistent in terms of my own internal value system. That said, it is very annoying to try to describe how and why to people who are committed to misunderstanding you or who have already decided who you are. So, you know, sometimes you just don’t bother, because it’s pointless, as discussed above. Protect your peace or whatever, idk.

But I wanted to know if the robot could see any inconsistencies, because I actually am a little obsessive sometimes with ensuring that my views are consistent, and I never want to be the kind of person who is clueless to their own hypocrisy or double-standards, or blind to their own faults (this is why I'm a proud regular L-poster; it helps keep me accountantable). Now, since ChatGPT is a known sycophant, I’m taking this with a grain of salt, but I can’t deny that I felt some smugness at the first sentence of its answer:

The “tensions” it went on to list all make perfect sense, really:

1. Liberty-first vs public safety
   Your stance: strong personal freedom, but you hate chaos/crime and want responsibility.

2. Max free speech vs cohesion
   Your stance: near-max speech, yet cohesion matters a lot.

3. Skepticism of elites vs preference for expertise
   Your stance: you dislike out-of-touch elites but you distrust the masses more on technical matters.

4. Localism vs national floors
   Your stance: prefer local control, but you want national guarantees for healthcare access, utilities/internet, and transportation.

5. Public options/UBI vs fear of rotating capture
   Your stance: you like public options and simplified universal benefits, but you assume government can be captured depending on who’s in office.

6. Immigration: cohesion-first + humanitarian + wage protection
   Your stance: strict border + generous legal pathways; cohesion first; punish employers for illegal hiring; and you don’t want wages suppressed.

There are easy and consistent enough political solutions to these presumed contradictions, and I’m not really concerned about them. But the real contradiction in my values that I keep coming back to, myself, is that while I’ve always been intuitively pulled toward a more localist style of governing, I also know what it is like to have your ability to choose what to do with your life constricted due to factors beyond your control. Like relocating to a state whose politics better suit your values and needs.

“Beyond your control” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, though, and the reason isn’t just that we will forever disagree about what is and is not within one’s control, but because we can never really know what that limit is until it’s stress-tested, hard, on the individual. There are things that seem impossible that, once you are able to change your mindset, become completely doable in an almost magical-feeling way. Not everything is like that, and you can’t always tell what is at first. People have to try harder when the environment is less forgiving, and sometimes when it's too easy to simply get by, there is less incentive to do so. Some people also absolutely crumble in the face of uncertainty and personal chaos and need more help. There's much to consider when it comes to priorities and possible second-order effects.

We went on to discuss other things like education and vouchers and got in the weeds about it all, just to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Nope.

Despite all my bitching and whining about woke intersectional feminist cancel culture, and despite my internal conflicts about local vs federal control for certain key issues, I'm still just a Millennial Liberal White Lady with a rebellious libertarian/anarchist bent.

Just like I've been saying.

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I considered just deleting the note, because damn. Although to be fair, it’s not like I didn’t post it fully expecting a bunch of backlash of exactly the variety I got, so I admittedly asked for this.

Anyway, if I deleted it, people might see a broken link somewhere and decide I did it because I couldn’t handle the constant negativity, which just isn't true. Worst of all, they might go on to believe I’m one of those horrible women (all of us, if you ask) who are incapable of accountability, and I definitely can’t have that. I’ve got a confusing and ever-changing reputation to uphold! So I guess I'll just deal with notifications from this thing until Substack fixes their “mute notifications” button or the sun dies, whichever comes first.

Anyway, since you guys won’t stop talking about it, I’m not going to, either. Fuck it. I’m just gonna smoke a bowl, turn on some music, and break this down.

Moving on.

So, there were a few persuasive genres of comments on this note that altered my perspective on the matter, or at least alerted me to where I was sloppy in my own arguments and could have been more clear. I will go over those in a minute.

There were also many comment genres that were not persuasive. I will break those down now, in bulk.

“People value different things, this shows they value babies more than PhDs, and this is Good and Correct.”

We value different things, sure. Obviously, even. Anyway, I agree: we should value family, it’s the most important thing, and new babies are an exciting addition to it, even if you aren’t particularly moved about babies and childbirth all that much in your day to day life.

What does “valuing family” even mean to you, though, if it doesn’t include being actively encouraging and celebrating with those babies as they grow and reach their own milestones? Does that particular family value expire, perhaps after 3rd or 8th grade “graduation,” or did it never really enter the minds of those promoting the concept in this way at all? It's not really the PhD you're being asked to celebrate, after all; it’s your loved one who got it that you’re supposed to be proud of.

(Feel free to take this lesson and apply it to the mother who just birthed the baby you're so much more excited about, while you're at it. The baby shouldn't be the only one you're proud of; its mom actually did the work to bring it here for you to fawn over.)

Related,

“No one is going to celebrate a PhD in something fake.”

First of all, no one knows what her PhD was in or what her book was about. She didn’t say, and it’s obvious why that was a wise choice for her, now. The point is, aside from the fact that calling whole research fields “fake” is annoyingly low-IQ (I can’t believe you made me say that), it’s also completely unverifiable. This whole argument about the topic in which she studied and wrote about is just a giant Rorschach test, and I played, too, by automatically granting that her mystery topic could be something I would consider “important,” whatever that's supposed to mean in 2026.

Without getting into the weeds about which PhDs are “useful” and which are “fake,” I will make the apparently bold proclamation that we should want to live in a generally more educated society, and that the demonic humanities do, in fact, count as part of that education. Every country needs its share of Musk-esque robots, but a country made up of only Musk-esque robots starts world wars. We need balance. And anyway, like BasicB said, someone’s gotta teach your kid’s English Comp class. Would you like your child taught by someone educated, or not? Easy choice if you ask me, but what do I know, I'm just a childless Millennial libtard who didn't even finish her bachelor's degree.

Let us not forget “I have both a PhD and children and I like my children more.”

The only appropriate response to this genre of comment is Yes, Duh. This is actually Right and Good and we all know this. You should feel more joy from your children than your PhD because your children are your children. There is no further explanation necessary, but also no one asked. I will use this opportunity to remind you that this anonymous Reddit lady presumably does not have children, since she posted the rant in the childfree sub. She did not complain that her family celebrated her children more than her PhD. She complained that her family only celebrated others’ children and barely her PhD, if at all. How you feel about yourself having both is irrelevant to this woman’s feeling snubbed by her family after obtaining one. No offense.

Another common complaint was that the woman seemed to want validation from her family.

This might be the most common genre of complaint, honestly, although I haven't counted (yet). Everyone cringes at someone who’s noticeably desperate for attention, and that’s what this kind of rant about not being recognized can look like to some people. Fair enough! We shouldn’t make a habit of needing to seek external validation all the time. If this lady is chronically doing this, she should probably work on that!

On the other hand, why shouldn’t a person expect normal amounts of validation from their family? Living with the expectation that your loved ones shouldn’t care about your accomplishments sounds unpleasant and actually abnormal to me, at best, and I suspect that’s probably not a super healthy parenting technique or relationship dynamic applied at scale. Of course we want validation from our “tribe.” How is this not the most normal impulse one can possibly have? It’s absurd to argue as though this is always some pathology instead of an evolved behavior because humans are social creatures.

Why should a person expect that their family be care only about a birth, but not also about what the one who was just born eventually does with their life? What about the hard work of raising the baby their family likely celebrated to become the kind of adult who works hard enough to do something like earn a PhD (or even become a respectable, successful DJ in Thailand with her ex-con boyfriend)?

Why is this the model of family life that you want to promote alongside your insistence that babies and families are the most important thing on this planet, to society as a whole?

What were the good points, though?

The most succinct “oh, duh” moment I encountered was that comparing having a baby and earning a PhD are category errors. They simply aren't directly comparable. They are apples and oranges. That’s the way the OP framed her argument, though, so I didn't think about it much and just went with it!

Anyway, that was an easy concession. These types of life goals and milestones achieve different ends and are important to the individual and their loved ones (or should be, in the case of the latter, but I digress) for different reasons. They both ultimately serve different functions.

...There are notable similarities, though. What is the driving force behind the human desire to propagate the species? There is a feeling that one has achieved a small sense of immortality knowing that their DNA is living on elsewhere and likely to continue, at least for another few generations or however long one wants to comfortably imagine. The survival instinct is strong.

As for pursuing PhDs or completing other significant pieces or bodies of work, I would argue that, leaving aside the more banal situation of pursuing one for professional development or a significant salary increase rather than organic interest, it's usually two things: a desire to be a part of meaningful progress in one’s field, or a desire to be personally remembered. The former is basically a covert immortality desire while the latter is overt. Self-centered as accused, but no more so than the people who have children in order to pass along their own DNA, consciously or not.

In the interest of addressing the other common comment that “PhDs are forgotten in the dustbin of history while children are forever” or something, let’s really think about it, if we must: if the research and life’s work of the PhD holder — or anyone else who achieves fame from their work —is important enough, they will likely be remembered for a longer time and by more people than your average parent. Mozart, for example. Most of the people who know who Mozart is centuries after his death probably don’t know his parents’ names or anything meaningful about them. Their names are recorded and able to be found easily enough, of course, but that wouldn’t be the case if Mozart himself hadn’t (defied his parents’ wishes for him to become a priest and) grown up to become who he was. It’s not simply because he was born that anyone can look up his parents on Wikipedia in 2026; it’s because of what he did with his own life after his parents put him here. The point is, if your goal is to be remembered for a long time, you just might have a better chance of that by doing something unique that society values, by going above and beyond normal expectations, like excelling at music or discovering something that contributes to important medical technology or something, whether or not you also have kids.

Of course, it must be said that everyone does not find that kind of fame or way of being remembered at all desirable; Mozart's parents probably wouldn’t care if they were on whatever they could have imagined as the future’s Wikipedia. This is good! Everyone can’t be famous, there just isn’t room.

Immortality through “greatness” — whether it be academic, athletic, art or otherwise — is a more appealing goal (or is it “value”?) to some people than having children. It’s just how it’s always been for a consistent but small number of the population. It’s not historically uncommon for some percentage of people to eschew family life to pursue higher knowledge in some form, or spiritual growth, humanitarian service, or whatever else that contributes to that body of human knowledge and improvement whether the seeker intends it to or not. What’s newer is for the reason to openly be more of an “I just don’t wanna” than an “I want to dedicate my life to pursuing X noble thing.”

Meaning crisis, probably, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.

Another frequent comment that I have come around to was that my remark about the rarity and difficulty of earning a PhD compared to the relative commonality of becoming a parent at some point in one’s life is irrelevant to how meaningful each event is to the lives of those involved. This is basically a version of the “this is a category error” comment type, but it’s worth picking apart a little bit.

My thought process wasn’t really “PhD rare, kids not, therefore PhDs more interesting.” It was more like, “I know how hard and rare it is to earn a PhD, so it’s crazy that basically this entire family is so unimpressed.” I compared their commonality as a way to illustrate that, but it didn’t really come out that way to some of y'all and I suppose that makes sense.

Anyway, my rant was not rooted in some desire to rank the importance of babies vs PhD holders, but rather that the feeling that treating your family like she claims they treated her, the way some of these commenters insist is Right and Good, is just a crappy way to relate to people you love.

When you’re family, you show the fuck up. Do you really have to be personally excited about all of your relatives’ interests to be expected to partake in the celebrating of at least some of their related milestones?2 To offer a simple Facebook “congratulations”? If you don’t make the effort because you have different “values,” you just might actually be that jerk family member everyone else complains about behind your back for not making that effort for the rest of the family, especially if you expect it from them.3 It’s not like they’re going to ask you to babysit their PhD or give it presents every year or buy wrapping paper and tins of cookies from its never-ending school fundraising catalogs even though you haven’t seen each other since last Thanksgiving.

It’s easy to be happy when someone else has a baby; it takes effort to show up when they grow up and do stuff you’re not really interested in but that’s important to them.

Go to the baby shower, send the new (or recurring) mom a gift card to a spa, give her an offer to babysit that you’ll actually follow through with, go to the graduation, send a card for the achievement they announced, google the general idea of what their dissertation was about so you can ask a polite question when you see them at the baby shower, buy the book or go to the reading even if you never intend to crack the book open yourself. Showing up for your family shouldn’t feel so optional!

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Three pieces published yesterday stood out to me as similar in certain ways. talks about why cultivating disagreeableness is important for overly-agreeable people; talks about how men actually don’t, as a whole, prefer overly-agreeable women, although women do appreciate a man who is dominant and aggressive in — importantly — “appropriate settings,” and says effectively the same thing CHH did about what women do appreciate, and goes on to expand on his theory, focusing on the other end of archetypal nerd-to-jock spectrum, and that theory is what I want to dig into more here.

I want to talk about the end of Rohan’s passage here:

A lot of the nerds were resentful in school because they were rejected in favor of the star athlete on the football team. What these nerds didn’t understand, however, was that a lot of the women would be more than happy to date them, except for the fact that they were more scared of the nerds than they ever were of the jocks.

Bolded emphasis mine. Now, humor me as I take Rohan’s one line here and use it as the jump-off point to an observation adjacent to his. He makes other, broader points about why we should all probably fear these “nerds” behind the paywall that I won’t spoil, but instead I want to talk about my interpersonal idea of what this “fear” is and where it comes from.

First, my instinct is to agree with this insight precisely because I’ve known the type he talks about pretty well over the years: the archetypal nerd who grows up and becomes angry at how he was treated most of his young life and struggles to move past it. Understandable! I’m not criticizing him for being affected by it, don’t yell at me. Anyway, by this point, he’s probably got a good job2 and is more attractive3 and maybe married with kids or whatever,4 but he never fully overcame the trauma of what he went through and stays at least a little angry about it. I have known a lot of these guys because, I’m guessing, I think I share certain nerdy or creative interests with them that have tended to put us in the same spaces over the years, and I’m pretty easy to talk to, so they do.

Anyway, this is not usually the kind of man anyone would immediately think of as “scary.” Physical power, like Rohan notes in his essay, is a significant part of what masculinity can look like, especially when viewed relative to femininity, and the kinds of men who carry this kind of resentment also, relatedly, tend not to project the kind of outward confidence usually required to scare people physically, regardless of what they actually look like.

So how can a nerd be threatening enough to scare women?

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The Great Algorithm Shit happened in 2018, which is what many at this point agree probably catalyzed the extent to which Facebook just became a family political deathmatch platform. Not long after, in 2020, Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, rode the coattails of TikTok’s success by embedding their own short-form video content, which it calls Reels, on Instagram first, and then a year or so later on Facebook. It was the introduction of the short-form video that I think really started its actual decline as something useful to keep up with and facilitated its turn into the outdated slop machine it’s become today.

Before that, like I mentioned, it was where you went to fight with your family and friends about politics and get blocked by your cousins and unfollow your kindergarten best friend because you interpreted videos of a smirking Catholic school kid differently. Sometimes you saw pictures of their kids, sometimes you got annoyingly vague hospital check-ins whose authors never bothered explaining or responding to the worried flurry of concerned comments when they were probably just there taking someone else in for a toothache, sometimes you got pitched an MLM, but for a lot of us, Facebook just became a battlefield. Cousin against cousin, uncle against niece, conservative Boomer father against Millennial progressive son.

It stayed a battlefield because that’s what we knew, though, and we didn’t know where else to replicate this ostensible new town square. Because before even all that, those of us who took to Facebook early and stuck around did so not because we enjoyed alienating and fighting with, or refereeing fights between, friends and family, but because it helped facilitate real life. We used it to plan events that took place in the real world, to post pictures showing the things we did with each other in person and talk about how fun it was, to post last-minute calls to hang out (again, in real life), to wish people happy birthday.

Facebook even helped create new friendships, or more easily maintain good ones that would have otherwise drifted apart due to time and distance, simply because you were reminded of each other’s existence every single time you logged on. Maybe it would be one of those friendships where all you ever did was comment positive things about each other’s photos and updates and never even meet up for coffee ever again, but a lot of times, close friendships bloomed, or rebloomed, as a result of staying connected on the website. People accepting your friend request (or sending you one) was implicit permission to engage with each other’s lives. While we thought at the time that it was clunky and not “human” enough, in hindsight, especially compared to now, it helped many of us be even more human in a rapidly digitized world, simply by giving us an excuse to reach out to more people we care about, or used to be close to, and reconnect.

Some of these things, though, especially the way Facebook birthday messages often replaced real phone calls and cards for a lot of younger and older people alike,1 were things that we mourned moving online, seemingly by forces outside our control. So many friends told me over the years that they’d have left the website once it became toxic or even just kind of a time suck if it weren’t for the fact that they’d never know what was going on in the real world without it. So many did leave for a while and then came back, citing the fact that without Facebook, they didn’t get texts for parties or events their friends would have otherwise sent them a Facebook invite for. If you weren’t on Facebook, it was like you didn’t exist.

It was at such peak saturation then that everyone was using it for everything, even as everyone was also growing very tired of using it for everything. Everyone lamented its control over our lives, but we didn’t know what there was to replace the utility it had made feel like a necessity in our lives, and we couldn’t trust that everyone would move to the same place now that skepticism and polarization were at all-time highs.

And it turned out, those fears were at least somewhat founded. Now that people have begun to organically move away from posting updates on Facebook in the ways they used to, due to a number of reasons including the aforementioned algorithm changes and the AI slop and not seeing friends and family’s updates until days after they’re posted, people have migrated elsewhere. They haven’t necessarily deleted their Facebook accounts, and they still check them every so often, even daily, but a lot of people have become lurkers rather than posters.

Me, for example. I was a prolific Facebook poster for years. The gap in my long-form writing between 2012 and basically 2023 happened precisely because I was using Facebook to “medium-form” write my own polemics and op-eds about everything from politics to shampoo to my latest experience at Walmart. Aside from the regular life updates and my brief role as Family Political Antagonist, I would also post jokes, funny stories, goofy photos, good photos, important updates about my life.

Now I rarely post anything. One regular time I get back on Facebook for a bit is when I’m back home in Minnesota, usually to announce that I’m in Minnesota and maybe create an event for a big hangout, but even then people don’t see my posts for days, at which point I’m probably back at the airport waiting to go home and had already given up on Facebook and texted or DMd people instead, anyway. It’s pointless now, if you want to use it for what it used to be good for.

An additional loss here is that these kinds of online events for the kinds of friends that are fun to see in groups but who you don’t know well enough or have time to hang with one-on-one on a short visit just don’t happen as often. Again, sure, a quick group text might get people showing up, but throwing out a “meet me at This Brewery at 5!” or creating a Facebook event was such a streamlined way to do it, and everyone could see who was coming instead of a pile of unfamiliar phone numbers. It was just easier when everyone was in the same place.

Anyway, I think there are a lot of reasons for this decrease in posting and increase in lurking. Besides the algorithm changes affecting what people see, how people post, and the way they do it when they do, they also know now, instinctually and probably through personal experience by this point, that anything they say can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion, and with Facebook being the one place where it’s actually completely normal for the majority of your mutuals to know where you work and who your friends are and even where you live, at least roughly, the potential risks of posting just about anything that isn’t a banal family photo are much higher.

So instead of risking all that with the people ostensibly closest to us, we save our posting for places like Substack, or X, or maybe Instagram or Bluesky or Threads where it’s more normal and expected to talk to and accumulate “friends” you don’t know in person, internet randos whose presence in your life may be positive and enjoyable while it lasts, but who you won’t miss much if you lose them due to something stupid you or they said, being much easier to “cancel” people whose friendships you don’t have a real, embodied stake in.2 Not that having a real, embodied stake stops a lot of people from this behavior, but it’s at least a buffer, a way to remind people of their shared humanity.

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Where do we go now?

Data show we’re still “on” Facebook, but like we saw earlier, as lurkers and consumers of passive entertainment, not as posters and sharers. For actual socializing, people are going to group chats, private DMs, smaller niche communities. This is probably healthy and mimics real life in important ways; for one, they’re intentional groups, like the ones we exist in as adults. Facebook, on the other hand, throws everyone from your anarchist cousin to your conservative boyfriend and your religious grandmother together in some kind of Thunderdome and just hopes for the best (or worst, for the clicks).

On the other hand, if you want to be in any of these groups, you need to be invited into them, or you need to create them, have people accept your invitation, hope it takes off, and maintain it. Barriers to entry are different and less automatic; you have to know people to know people. You have to be able to network before you can be accepted into the fold. And where do you network anymore? Where is the new digital town square?

And that’s the other thing: you know who currently uses Facebook the most? People in rural areas — people who live in the most sparsely populated areas who may have a harder time than urban and suburban counterparts connecting regularly with extended family and friends in person.

The loneliness crisis is real, and it affects just about everyone in terms of demographics, although each is going to experience it differently and for different reasons. And, weirdly enough, I think Facebook was one of the last things keeping its youngest regular users, Millennials — by and for whom it was originally created — connected by whatever tenuous thread to the close friendships and other relationships we still wanted to hold onto despite years and miles between us.

There’s a case to be made for the fact that it’s still very new to expect to remain connected to people we met once at a party or a concert for the rest of our lives. It struck many of us as a little weird while we were actively doing it, but at the same time, it was so normal. The light self-deprecation we engaged in admitting the absurdity of the reality we lived in now, where it was perfectly normal to become Facebook friends with the random future bridesmaid you met at a bachelorette party the night you ended up at the same bar where they had their party, was just nodded along with agreement as we continued on, doing the same thing.

My Facebook friends were made up almost entirely people I knew (or people I met at a bar once at their bachelorette party or whatever, but still), people with whom I’d had at least one face-to-face meeting and found interesting enough to keep in contact with. I once became Facebook friends with a stand-up comedian at a bar after his set who gave me and my friend a ride home, and who shortly after referred me to one of my favorite jobs where I met tons of real-life friends I’m still in regular contact with today.

The outliers were people who maybe I’d never physically met, but with whom I’d shared some kind of long internet friendship based on one thing or another, and care about as though they were real friends, and so I consider them to be as much. I never went beyond around 600 or so Facebook “friends” since I rarely friended people I didn’t already know, or with whom I shared local mutuals plus a reason to connect with them (the latter situation being how I met my husband), and I liked it that way because my goal on Facebook was to keep up with people I already knew.

I started on LiveJournal over twenty years ago, where I posted near-daily updates for my friends only, almost all of them people I knew in real life, just like my later MySpace and Facebook connections. This didn’t change until I started Substack Notes, honestly. I was using Twitter to promote my blog in 2010, but even then, I didn’t enjoy that I was talking to mostly strangers. Who are these people and why do I care about them and the nonsense they’re spewing over here? was my usual line of thinking. I remember that meme:

...and I thought it was funny because I related to the Facebook part, but I could not relate to the Twitter part, mostly because I stayed off the app altogether unless I was tired of the political fights with family and friends and took one of many “Facebook breaks” to instead to go Twitter to yell at strangers about the same things. Get along with people on Twitter? Actually like them? Preposterous. I guess I thought it was cathartic to go there just to be politically angry out loud, but mostly it was pointless, as is obvious to anyone who’s spent any time arguing with dedicated trolls on the internet, especially on Twitter or X. Yelling either at people or into the wind stops being satisfying fairly quickly, but so does yelling at, and being yelled at by, your family and friends.

Now here I am on the version of a Twitter feed that I actually like and have gained enough traction on that I can actually engage with folks and get to know people, and I have begun to understand what people liked about the old Twitter, or even the “old” X. I get it now.

But damn, it’s just not enough. All the planned video chats and DMs and regular back and forth typed conversations are just not enough if you don’t also have that real life that so many are missing today, whatever their reasons may be. It’s good, it’s great and kind of amazing, even, but it’s not enough in the way that we need, as humans.

We hit Peak Confessional Essay sometime in the early 2010s, but they’re back. Not just essays, but videos and other confessional media, various ways to show emotions and tell stories of an extremely personal nature usually reserved for the confidence of close friends.

People have been writing more of them, at least from my anecdotal experience and the observations others have made. I mean, I write them, in many ways, although I never really think of them as “confessional.” Half the reason for this blog’s existence is for me to have a place to dump personal old stories. But really, what I think is going on with the return of the deeply emotional confessional essay is that it’s a very female way of dealing with their own loneliness crises, which we’re over here having at apparently equal rates, but in, again, different ways than the men and boys are. These are pleas, in a sense, to be heard where they don’t feel heard elsewhere. This is how some women reach out. The deep, personal essay is one way to do that, and to possibly receive at least a little hit of dopamine for their efforts where none otherwise exists.

I don’t think I ever thought I’d say this, but right now, I actually miss Facebook. At least, I miss the times before the fragmentation. And honestly, I’m probably remembering it a lot more fondly than it was at the time and idealizing what it represented more than what it really was, but anything seems better than the social decay of now, sometimes.

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Now that that’s out of the way!

My values broadly align with a left-libertarian perspective on civil liberties and surveillance. But because the ICE operations in Minneapolis and elsewhere were ostensibly about arresting violent illegal immigrants and deporting them, my interest in what was going on in Minneapolis was mostly low — until Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by federal agents there. Their deaths and ICE’s recent actions against protesters are where most of my interest in this matter is right now, because I care a great deal about the state feeling free to quickly and easily kill its own citizens without consequence and the propaganda and polarization that will make too many people think that it’s fine, actually, because it’s people they don’t like, and we’ve normalized thinking your political opponents aren’t human anymore.

I won’t even bother trying to plead to anyone who believes in “American values,” whatever that means anymore, that they should also care about this, because now, a loud chunk of people openly eschew these values in favor of a “strong man” wiping out their enemies, real or perceived, crushing them swiftly and, hopefully, bloodily, “legality” or “constitution” be damned. At this point, I think people will just believe what they will believe, and also, everyone is not like me, I cannot make them be like me, so I may as well not bother wishing for that, because that’s just bad strategy.

The genre of post I typically avoid making on social media or even in a planned essay1 these days would be the kind where I talk about the tragedy of Pretti’s death and why I think it was unjustified. There are muddy details,2 there are predictable speculations surrounding his gun that will, conveniently, never be able to be answered definitively, the propaganda machine will spin relentlessly, memes will win over real news where it even exists, and no one will be held accountable. Events like this contain quickly-moving pieces and it can feel pointless and impossible to keep up.3 I just don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of current events and politics on a serious level online these days, and I’ve stayed mostly out of it for years now. The arguments are endless and it gets maddening.

I’m over it.

But Alex Pretti has instead been an apparent exception to my usual unwillingness to provoke discussions and arguments about a controversial issue that “hijacked” my intellect by pissing me off, one of the rare ones that pop up every once in a while, a news event that actually makes me stop and watch, and read, and finally want to say something, even if it is just more personal and mostly apolitical in nature. This isn’t an abstract political drama about illegal immigration or fraud to me anymore because, for the first time that I can remember, the victim actually seems like someone who is like me.

I am not a conservative nor religious nor even a little bit of a Charlie Kirk fan, but it was easy to join his mourners in shock and sadness after he was killed, even when they got political and I didn’t agree with them, even when they declared war on what is commonly understood to be “my” side, on me. I could understand the oft-repeated sentiment that any one of them could be, in effect, Charlie. He may have been a wealthy influencer and political talking head, but in important ways, he was also just a normal guy, in a manner that people both identified with and aspired to.

I can understand that feeling because Alex seemed like me. Not even because of his presumed politics, but at least a little because he looked like a grown-up 2010s Northeast hipster archetype with an adult job and a protesting side-hobby to go along with his outdoorsy adventures. Extremely Minnesota-coded. His vibe, as presented so far online by reasonable and reliable sources not trying to paint him as a deranged would-be assassin, is a lot like me.

And I explain here, in this note, why I stayed with more superficial ways in which I can relate to Pretti.

So, yes, I’m sorry to say, for anyone who was previously under a different impression due to my vocal hatred of identitarian politics, cancel culture, “woke” mandates, and my easy criticism of the left’s various political strategies or lack thereof, liberals are like me. Aging hipster liberals with nursing degrees who live and work in Minneapolis, ride bikes and go backpacking and do outdoorsy shit, who care about people and the environment and want to protect them both, who probably go to trivia night every Thursday night at the neighborhood brewery with their coworkers, are like me. They are my people.

Like says, “every family and friend we hang out with is this guy.”

You know what I mean. I know you do because we saw and heard many people say similar things after things Charlie Kirk was murdered. “I Am Charlie Kirk.”

I talk a lot about resisting tribalism and approaching topics with nuance and as little bias as one can manage; I stress (and complain about) how I think it’s important to be nice, how I prefer Minnesota’s passive-aggressive but polite culture to the ostensibly more “real” one that is also harsher out on the Mid-Atlantic coast; I talk a lot about the importance of civility and respectability. I unironically (albeit with my tongue in my cheek) call myself the Tone Police and argue in favor of chilling the fuck out sometimes for your own sake and that of your cause.

I can get a lot of annoying shit from a variety of people for some of these things, but I’m not completely out of step with some of them, this time: a man like me was just killed by his — our — government. And I'm going to feel something about that. We all do — we all will — when it’s someone like us.

So, despite my general desire to see everyone get along and to see smarter, more focused protests instead of dangerous ones, and civility instead of seething contempt, I also think: “Fuck these fuckers.” Along with some other things I won’t bother typing out loud.

A lot of people on the right said the murder of Charlie Kirk was their last straw, and I’ve started to hear people on the left say the same thing about Alex Pretti.

And, I’m just saying, that’s kind of a dangerous mindset for half the country to take turns falling into, isn’t it? I see more people wanting to see more of this, not less, without any such self-awareness or care, and that’s what’s really scary, to me. That’s not where we should want to be.

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What did you think politics meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.1

First of all, almost no one but literal policy wonks talk to their friends about anything in the left column. People elected to city hall and who work for the DoT and whose random special interest is trains talk about that shit. Your average person doesn't talk or think about any of that to even know how they feel about it, let alone their friends. It's too bad because more people should care about what goes on in the left column, but a whole lot check out in favor of the right, as though it were a game and you had to only pick one. Sounds like a scam to me.

Second of all, every single thing on the right is inherently and obviously very, very political. Just because you personally believe in something extra hard, just because the thing is related to your sexual orientation or your mom's immigration status, doesn't mean it's not political. It's the very fucking definition of political and you're more than likely actively using politics to try to get what you want about it.

Third of all, absolutely no one, even fewer people than are out in the wild talking earnestly about altering the maximum height of buildings in their neighborhoods, are asking questions like, “are Nazis bad?” Even the most white-supremacisty white supremacist isn't asking such dumbass questions. No one you're imagining asks whether black people are bad. None of these people ask if gay people are human beings. When you're an actual bigot, you don't ask these questions, presumably because you've been on the planet long enough to know how to communicate. If you're an actual bigot, you just fucking say those things, or quietly believe it, and vote according to those quiet beliefs.

You know what voting does? It puts politicians — you know, the people we elect to do politics and be political on our behalf — in office. To do politics about the very things you insist are not political. So what are you going to do in response to the knowledge that that guy is going to vote according to his bigoted beliefs you don't believe in? You'll probably vote in the opposite direction. You'll probably do politics about it.

How is it that you want to ensure gay and trans people are treated humanely? What would you like done so that no more war crimes happen? How do you make sure woman and men aren't paid unfairly in relation to one another? And who are you demanding make it all happen?

I promise you the only answer that makes any sense is one you're probably already engaging in, if you care as much as you say you do, which is persuasive and agitative work to change laws — likely targeting lawmakers. The whole “hearts and minds” strategy of the past is no longer reliable on a widespread scale in an online ecosystem that thrives on snark memes for political engagement, but you can't be adamantly unlikeable and expect to succeed at changing anyone's mind. You want a law changed, you target the lawmakers, or the people with money who own them and their decisions.

Making laws, like the ones about gay marriage and abortion and what to do with refugees and trans kids and building heights and tax levies, are what politicians do. In fact, it's their whole entire job! It's okay to just admit it so we can do the hard work of actually making sure they follow through!

On a related note, if I had to resign myself to maintaining friendships with the depth of a rapidly evaporating rain puddle where the most we're allowed to disagree with each other about is what to put on a pizza, fucking shoot me. What a waste.

Send these people to a commune and don't let them out until the herd has thinned by at least half and they've got that last bit of hippie ass utopia beaten out of them, Lord of the Flies style. (I don't know what that truly entails, I never actually finished that book.)

Just admit it's all political and get on with it.

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I believe strongly that truth is an important, if not one of the most important, pursuits in life. I am also from Minnesota, where being polite and choosing passive-aggression over directness are something like honorary state statutes, but I sincerely appreciate the more positive aspects of those cultural expectations and don’t think they’re intrinsically dishonest. I think arguments against minding one’s tone are often missing something not because they’re necessarily wrong, but because they miss the nuance of when tone actually does matter, and why it’s important to differentiate.

In a recent essay on the Tone Fallacy, provides a good framework for looking at tone and when it is important, and also why it often doesn’t matter at all. While I tend to be firmly in the “be nice” camp overall, I agree broadly with his points, and I’ll expand on what he says and also why I don’t think “tone policing” is always at odds with truth, and when it can be, and when it isn’t helpful.

Here Quinn explains what the tone fallacy means and from where he’s arguing his points:

The premise behind tone policing is transactional: modify your delivery, and you’ll get a fair hearing. Be calm, be measured, be polite, and rational people will engage with your ideas. This is the bargain offered to those who raise uncomfortable truths. But history reveals this bargain to be fool’s gold.

Bolded emphasis mine.

This is, in my experience, true. “Be nicer and we’ll hear you out” is the constant refrain against those making uncomfortable statements, but as Quinn states, giving examples from the Suffragettes to AIDS activists of the 1980s, people try being polite first, and no one listens. It’s not until they get louder, angrier, and possibly disruptive or even violent that anyone starts paying attention. And, as we saw with AIDS, civil rights in the 1960s, and the Suffragettes, among other movements, it often eventually works. Power responds to power, not merely polite requests.

While tone becomes a factor in a number of debates even if it doesn’t translate to different actions among those targeted, like Quinn also notes later in his essay, “tone policing” is not always inappropriate in all settings, such as in “teaching, therapy, mediation, [and] scientific collaboration.” I think there are other times in which it matters, too.

Interpersonally and romantically, the dynamic changes

I think a lot of this all can be tied in rather neatly with the ongoing debate about feminization; who we think of as the “tone police” right now are usually women in corporate, educational, or other institutional settings.

In heterosexual romantic relationships, however, the usual dynamic is often swapped. It’s interesting to note how often we see men accuse their girlfriends or wives of coming at them too harshly when it comes to approaching conflict, often arguing some version of “if you’d just asked more nicely, or treated me better when you brought it up...” The woman, in response, is often exasperated, claiming that she has, in fact, been nice about it, many times, until she wasn’t anymore and started yelling and said, look, now you’re at least paying attention.

It’s not uncommon to hear mothers say this to their children, either. I can remember many an instance of being yelled at about chores and making the same claim: “well you don’t have to yell at me about it!” and my mother correctly reminding me that she had asked me nicely approximately 17 times before and that it wasn’t until she actually yelled at me that I finally did the damn dishes.

In romantic relationships, these issues can often reflect deeper relational issues between the couple, but they’re not dissimilar to those we see in broader discourse and other adult relationships. No one wants to be yelled at, and it legitimately makes it more difficult to hear and respond to the words behind the tone if you feel personally attacked in the process. But even in these examples, no matter how true, Quinn’s original observation remains: the polite tone, presumably used in the beginning, still wasn’t acknowledged when it was used, let alone responded to with curiosity and a desire to solve a problem or reach a common truth with the other party.

In relationships, especially, it’s accepted that the way in which a couple communicates is often the biggest indicator of whether or not they’ll stay together. I think the feelings and behaviors that the Gottmans describe as the “Four Horsemen” of relationship killers show up not just in marriages, but also friendships and political adversarial relationships. If you treat someone with contempt, constantly criticize them, and are overly defensive and ignore well-intentioned critique, your debate isn’t going to be productive, and the relationship — whatever type it is — will be strained.

Those qualities in conflict will likely only inflame the other side, making an actual solution further away or altogether impossible. Using harsh language and rhetoric is often necessary in larger political arenas or in important cultural battles, but in interpersonal relationships, it is often ineffective and counterproductive.

There’s a widespread assumption among those on the “truth over feelings” side, at least socially, that if you don’t state the truth in the harshest and most deliberately cold way that you can, you’re not telling the whole truth, or that you’re letting an important principle slide by softening your choice of phrase. I have found this to be a huge difference regionally and have talked about not really fitting in, as a native Midwesterner, here out East where I currently live as a result, but it’s not limited to geography. And, contra the “honesty above everything even (especially) if it's mean” folks, I’ve seen this allegedly nonexistent balance of truth and a reasonably respectful tone play out in my own life rather successfully.1

Colliding narratives but make it polite

During a recent conflict I had with someone, an interesting and important factor of it and other arguments I've had with this person is the way in which she has always defended her positions. This is 2025, so naturally these arguments have all taken place over text message. In fact, I’d say text is sometimes a superior way to have an important discussion with someone if you know emotions can be volatile regarding the topic; it gives both parties — if committed — a chance to cool off and make less impassioned, more thoughtful and empathetic arguments.

Her tone with me when arguing, even in the midst of accusing me of various unpleasant behaviors and beliefs, was so profoundly calm and explanatory. She began with a sympathetic reaction to the content of my previous text to her, recounted her version of events that led her to feel the way she did, laid out in detail how she felt without explicitly calling me names, layered in empathy for what she perceived me to be going through, and ended in a kind manner. She pretty much sandwich-methoded me.

This isn’t the first friendship in which I’ve experienced such an argument over text message. One other such friendship was a long one that ended during the 2016 upswing of political extremism from both sides that culminated in a lot of leftists un-personing their friends and family. This friendship, however, did not end in the same way that the recent one did. That was a series of escalating accusations and anger thrown in both directions, as well as the requisite feelings that we both needed to air our grievances to everyone around us to feel justified in our anger and choices. I don’t think anyone was really happy about how it went down.

This most recent time was not like that, and the difference was almost entirely in tone. For one, when you are faced directly with a calm explanation of grievances or hurt feelings rather than a barrage of insults and bad-faith accusations, you’re not only more likely to listen to the content of those grievances, you’re more likely to respond in kind. When you respond in kind, you are both more open to feeling empathy over defensiveness (or at least alongside it) and one of two things happens: you either find your way back together with mutual understanding, or you part ways — with mutual understanding.

Now, I did not agree with the content of those grievances or bad-faith accusations made in the polite tone I was grateful for, but I matched her tone when I told her as much.

I consider this a good example of softening one’s words without sacrificing truth because there was nothing there that she said that would have been made more truthful, more profound, or more convincing had she used harsher language. I can't know what she might have wanted to say and didn't, but she didn't seem to be prioritizing tone over truth when she told me that she thought I’d treated her disrespectfully and how she described how my words made her feel — she did annoy me with the accusations, but perhaps because I’ve been accused of similar things (for similarly absurd reasons) in much harsher and hysterical tones in the past, I know that I would have been much less likely to even consider whether or not she was correct had she gone on an emotionally-reactive, ideological, identitarian diatribe instead. And I know she’s capable of it. But because we were both committed to taking the time to read and respond thoughtfully, I knew I was grasping her meanings and she could trust that I would.

The truth is, through that text message and the couple “big discussions” like it that we’ve had over the years, I was always much more able to listen to what she was telling me because of the way that she said it. Until this particular instance, I had often conceded many of her points, and she mine, during these more productive and polite, respectful — if not tense and uncomfortable — exchanges. That it didn’t work this time wasn’t an indictment of either of our communication styles or the way that we spoke to each other, exactly, but one of our incompatible personalities and lifestyles. But either way, the ability to communicate like that about tough issues is always inspiring, because it’s not easy.

Another way of looking at tone in this context is more self-interested: if you approach the other person — especially over text, which can live forever — with respect and a calm, fair demeanor, you're on the record as being reasonable. While Quinn is right that many people won’t change their minds regardless of how you phrase your argument, when these discussions are conducted in a text-based format, the negative things you say in the heat of the moment will be used against you and aid your opponent in making you look unprofessional, insensitive, emotionally unhinged, or just like an asshole if they decide they want to talk to other people about it or even post your messages online for the world to devour and judge for themselves.

“Cover Your Ass,” you know? In my case, she at least preemptively protected herself against any potential accusations that she was being unreasonable in her approach to me, had I wanted to misleadingly frame it that way to other people.

Politically and culturally — do we actually want institutional and societal decorum?

In politics, there’s been constant debate for a while now over decorum and respectability, and I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, I am a boring West Wing kind of person2 and prefer the grown-up, mature nature of rational debate where opinions are respected and all sides are respectfully allowed to speak, are responded to in kind, and productive, society-enhancing decisions eventually synthesize. It makes me feel like my “leaders”3 are capable, rational adults who have our best interests in mind, even if I know, cynically but realistically, that it’s not really true.

Of course, that desire and belief in such a tone can cause one to become susceptible to manipulation, and politicians especially rely on this. As Quinn goes on:

This is why con artists, demagogues, and corporate PR teams are so effective. Entrepreneurs seeking funding succeed when their vocal tones denote focus, low stress, and stable emotions, allowing listeners to draw conclusions about competence. The substance doesn’t matter as long as the delivery is smooth.

Trump, however, is clearly not your usual president, or even your usual politician, when it comes to the way he speaks to the public or presents himself. His past precludes that from even being a possibility, but he also does nothing to apologize for or try to change that reality. He leans into it and people eat it up. They appreciate his blunt delivery, tired of stiff and blatantly phony figureheads and relieved at his “realness.” Even his opponents often say things like, “you’ve gotta admit, the guy is just funny” and try to come up with ploys to get their own guys to act like him. Just like Democrats liked when Anthony Weiner would get up in Congress and start yelling at everyone, and it’s why British politicians routinely have absurd-looking-to-Americans fights on the Parliamentary floor (ngl, I love that shit).

As observes about Trump:

When you signal your vice, however, everything is already out on the table. If you preemptively admit that you blow guys for cocaine, then it’s not exactly a scandal when someone catches you blowing a guy for cocaine.

Liberals hate hearing this, but this is something that T Dawg is a master of, and one of the reasons why their “this is not normal” rhetoric falls on deaf ears for a large percentage of the population.

I always thought that if Bernie had said the kinds of things Trump said, in the same tone but with his own political flair (and to be fair, he sometimes stuck a toe in those waters), the broader left who complains about this tendency of Trump's probably would have loved it. It’s not the tone or Trump’s audacity that bothers many people, it’s what’s being said with it that people already disagree with. People respect a leader who isn’t afraid to say what they mean, what they want to do, and why. People who respond positively to this want to be led by a kind of “strong man,” not someone who is careful and empathetically precise and attuned to other people’s feelings, whether they are temperamentally conservative or liberal.

They just want the strong man on their own terms. If the Democrats and left as a whole were at all concerned with being “nice” all the time to their opponents, you wouldn’t see AOC personally engaging in a social media dispute insulting a conservative influencer, or anybody celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder. Few people are actually that nice; they simply stick up for their own side and cite related principles when they’re aligned with what that side is doing, ignoring them when they’re not.

Everybody’s doing it

People talk sometimes about how it’s a shame no one gets dressed up to fly anymore, or how people are too comfortable walking around the grocery store in leggings and messy buns, kids wearing sweatpants to school — many customs that shifted as a result of the concept of “soft pants” that emerged after Covid when there was serious anti-denim sentiment in the air.4

I think this vocalized desire is adjacent to tone policing. While it’s not about what you say, it’s about what you do and how you present yourself, and what that says about your respect for other people and society as a whole. The people who want to bring back dressed-up housewives in grocery stores and make young people stop wearing pajamas everywhere are often also the same people complaining that activists are too rude and annoying and that wives yell too much, so I posit that tone policing is an impulse most of us have at some point or another, often because the content of what is being delivered in any given tone is what really offends us, not because we object to the volume of an argument that we don’t like, and it’s easier to call out snark or yelling than it is to either address the content of the concern, or engage in an exhausting fight about it.

Here’s my overall take on where expectations do, or should, be:

1. A certain level of decorum and a version of tone policing should be expected in institutions such as the courts, higher education at the administrative level and above, and government. Without consistent and aspirational tone and conduct in our political and judicial systems, we lose public trust and risk growing societal breakdown. We have to be able to at least trick ourselves into believing that things are working well enough that our institutions are capable of holding things together. We’re seeing this right now. That said, I can appreciate the need for less decorum in politics to shake things up a little, depending on the political climate and the methods used.

2. Minding one’s tone interpersonally is probably most important, imo. This is the arena of life where your tone can make or break a relationship, and where you can inflict the most emotional damage — or have it inflicted on you. This is where it’s important to be careful and thoughtful while being truthful in the midst of interpersonal conflicts and one-on-one debates with people with whom you wish to maintain a respectful relationship.

3. Tone does not help nor matter in activism once respectability has been tried and almost inevitably fails to change the public opinion on a large, divisive issue. I do, however, think it’s important to have a “respectability wing” in activist movements; this is a nascent opinion I’ll try to expand on later, but lending credibility to a movement with such simple actions as wearing suits or simply refusing to physically move while doing something inarguably inoffensive is undeniably a tactic that has worked in the past. Gaining public sympathy is important for any movement to succeed, and that’s what “respectability politics” contributes to any movement. It will help somebody change their minds about you, and that’s what activism is about.

What do you think?

If you picked “something else,” feel free to explain in the comments!

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Then — what I am going to focus on here — there are the bizarre hypotheticals, debates about which will find their way into the far reaches of otherwise-unrelated Substack, Twitter, and beyond, baffling and grossing everyone out and causing waves of backlash to the mere act of asking the questions at all.

There are a number of more prominent philosophers and/or rationalists putting forth these questions or hypothetical moral dilemmas and thought experiments for public debate and who, as a result, attract the most hate. They also perform various stunts or agree to say silly things for their causes, which ironically enough end up sometimes quite literally being successful in helping advance their obscure cause.

A couple of the most controversial topics as of late include making AI child porn and, most recently, Hanania’s argument that more old men should date teenagers for the sake of possibly getting them pregnant and helping the fertility crisis, and that we should actively stigmatize dating women past peak fertility age.

The criticism to rationalist ideas, whether real or hypothetical, vary in specifics, but what they all share in common is a visceral disgust for the subject matter, and a desire to put a stop to such things being discussed in the public sphere out of a sense of decency.

Contra the Rationalist haters, I think their commitment to absurd debate is not only fine, but in fact an active public good in many cases. Even when the ideas most people find absurd are put forth seriously and not in the form of a hypothetical like Hanania’s most recent, it’s not useless for the public to assess, reassess, or even just reaffirm where they stand after reading another perspective on the topic. Knowing where you stand and being strong in your convictions is a virtue, and it’s a convenient symptom of a culture that encourages rigorous debate stemming from imagination and curiosity.

Encouraging the suppression of debate in this way, based primarily on the disgust response elicited, is the same impulse as managerial HR speech repression that stifles and “feminizes” speech not because they — like literally everything — are directly comparable, but because the end results of their utilization are similar: an effective suppression of open curiosity, and the suppression of the extremes of allowable speech leads to a fear of discovery and further truth:

The incentive for the diminution required in female space stems from competitive suppression. In groups, women default to this mode of speech, which purposely lacks substance, for that would require a hierarchy of ideas and would expose that some women are simply more intelligent than others. Denial of variance in intellect among women is also related to the denial of sex differences.

Both imagine the others' speech to be societally harmful, but don’t see — or acknowledge — the potential for negative consequences in their own. Both decide that the curiosity itself — about crime and IQ statistics, noticing controversial patterns, introducing the absurd hypotheticals — is the real problem. Both have decided it's necessary to shut down debate because of the offense — nay, disgust — the subject matter causes them, specifically, and demands their sensitivity be catered to by those less emotionally reactive to such topics who have no need for such guardrails and are perfectly capable of separating the entertaining from the acceptance of ideas, surprisingly forgetting that without anyone to stomach the most grotesque of humanity to investigate and learn about it, how will we protect ourselves from it at all?

We need defense of the debate itself without presumed attachment to the premises of them, which is the most frustrating aspect of the way the anti-rationalists argue: they think that to even propose such a hypothetical is evidence of a mental illness or other pathology and should not be taken seriously on those grounds alone, but I counter that even if the willingness to propose such an idea is evidence of mental illness or social pathology, so what? Why not ask these questions, expose them to sunlight? Why not inspire people to think about these questions that, no matter how unrealistic, may be mirrored or harkened back to in later days when some lesser, more routine moral dilemma arises? What are we still afraid of?

We're not really arguing or mostly even disagreeing about whether or not any given idea is disgusting, but whether we should be asking if people think it is at all, and I say yes. Yes, of course we should ask the question if we want to ask the question. Of course we should encourage debate, especially in polarizing times, especially about unrealistic and far-fetched ideas which help us connect and determine our own limits both psychologically and philosophically, and ultimately, politically and personally.

A refusal to personally engage is one thing; a preference for or against a conversation topic is certainly normal and we all have an obvious right to talk, or not talk, about whatever we'd like. But to suggest we discourage open debate and encourage mockery of those who participate in it because it includes certain "icky" topics is to squash the very nature of curiosity itself. The society that can't stomach the grotesque eventually flattens the mundane, further narrowing the Overton Window.

More credence needs to be given to the reality that one can entertain an idea without endorsing it, and that it is, in fact, a virtue to be able to do so and not a sign of moral weakness. The ability to discern one's morality from the hypothetical is as human as it gets.

In art school, a white girl with fire engine red dreadlocks turned around to inform a student in our English Comp class that her use of the term “gypsy” was offensive, actually, and that the correct name for this population of people was “Romani” or “Roma.”

Fair enough! I didn't look it up, I just believed her. It wasn’t yet so common back in the vintage year of 2003 to receive umm ackshuallys like this in a college class (although I was just starting to hear that I should stop saying “ghetto” — a favorite in my extremely racially diverse K-12 schools back then — as an adjective), so I assumed it seemed like a valuable enough piece of information to retain, not yet having reached peak language-police saturation.

Since my former classmate's brief lecture over twenty years ago, I've of course heard the claim/admonishment from other sources countless more times, and despite the fact that I’m not sure I’ve ever actually known a single Romani person in my life, on the rare occasion I need to refer to this group of people, I do just say “Romani.”1

...As it turns out, so do most of the most virulent Romani-haters in Europe, which you'll quickly see if you frequent any number of international subreddits. It seems that banning words doesn’t actually ban the bigotry behind them, but merely changes the language used to communicate the very same bigotry. Who knew!

As the years of my indulgence in the internal logic of critical theory crept along, I kept learning about more words that no one knew were offensive that I was supposed to avoid saying because they were offensive to people who, like me, had only just now learned they ought to be offended by them.

The expanding list of forbidden words

Remember hearing about how you shouldn't say “lame” because it used to be the official medical term for people with certain physical disabilities? Or “idiot” and “moron” for intellectual disabilities? Don't forget “crazy” which is still periodically tsk'd today, or, most famously, retarded, the most forbidden n-word of them all.

I remember where I was when I discovered that 95% of the words in the English language were actually violently bigoted, especially against people with any kind of disability. I was on the internet reading a feminist blog sometime in the late aughts or early 2010s. Feminism, perhaps feeling its own cultural relevance as a social movement waning, had begun to loudly take on more causes not explicitly related to women at all but somehow still ostensibly about women for the simple fact that any woman could also be anything else, particularly other marginalized identities — black or disabled or trans or retarded or whatever — and feminism is for everybody and should therefore be inclusive. Intersectional, even. To the point that actually being a woman became something of an afterthought, an unimportant detail, as all social justice causes became something of a melting pot of marginalization under the umbrella of Feminism™, none more distinguished or in need of differentiation than the next. There would be no salad bowl anymore.

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So anyway, I was scrolling through this new and highly anticipated blog called FWD, also to be read as an acronym meaning “Feminists With Disabilities (for a way forward),” and found their section on ableist language. The tag is for essays featuring explanations about how and why many popular words and phrases are actually offensive to people with various disabilities. It included examples of words no one ever used insultingly towards people with disabilities, that no one using it today would have even assumed originally meant something offensive to begin with.

They were ultimately informing us of the history of old slurs, and then demanding we re-adopt them by giving them more power and then announcing our refusal to say them, citing reasons that haven't offended anyone in decades at least. Offending more people is the only real effect of systematically doing this.

This concept is not entirely unreasonable, of course. There are plenty of things we can all do to be more considerate people, and changing your language when people tell you it's offensive to them is a nice choice that usually costs you nothing and makes you a nicer person. Being a nice person is a good trait and we should all generally strive to be kind to people.

But listen. How long can a word be out of circulation as an active, common slur before we are allowed to reclaim its original meaning, use it in quotes, and not fear reproach for not knowing it might have offended someone's 4x great-grandmother if we’d said it a couple hundred years ago? When can we all try to be just a little less sensitive to every damn thing all the time?

Is our language descriptive, prescriptive, or some other, third thing that critical theory academics are about to invent?

Like writes in an essay about language and how to define “woman” and other sex and gender related terms, the English language is considered descriptive, not prescriptive. Our English language dictionaries change definitions of words to reflect their common usage, not to instruct us on their use. As Amod explains:

As for “female”: given the stock that the anti-complexity right puts in dictionaries, it’s of major importance that Webster itself has added a definition of “female” as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” (emphasis added); Oxford, too, following the definition of “designating the sex which may bear offspring”, has added the meaning “designating the gender or (in later use) gender identity associated with this sex”. As they should – because, as mentioned, dictionaries reflect common usage, and like it or not, these new meanings are now in common usage.

Unless we want to adopt a French model (I'm in favor, but alas), this is simply reality and neurotic semantics despots such as myself would do well to get over it and worry about something else. And I swear I'm not picking on Amod here (read the linked article, it's thorough and informative!), but the following excerpt highlights why this kind of linguistic chaos is so frustrating to me:

And of course, if one defines “female” in that way, then the “adult human female” definition itself becomes trans-inclusive in exactly the way the definition was deployed to avoid. You probably shouldn’t play the dictionary definition card when the dictionaries themselves are going to change their definition to the one you oppose. Simplistic thinkers like Walsh and Keen-Minshull have, to use a term current when their preferred definitions were still the main ones in the dictionary, been pwned.

I just want words to mean things and generally stay that way. I’m just saying I want standards!

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When dictionaries stopped making sense

Remember the word “literally”? While people have been misusing it for creative hyperbolic effect for literal2 centuries, in 2011, Merriam-Webster made waves by officially updating their definition of “literally” to include its antonym, “figuratively,” and other dictionaries followed suit. After that, all hell broke loose and now nothing means anything anymore.

I might be being a bit dramatic here, but we have all seen concept creep in real life and how destructive and confusing it makes communicating with one another, especially across class and ideological lines. The internet only hastened this effect. “Gaslighting” means lying now; “violence” means any verbal criticism directed at you; “trauma” means any kind of discomfort one might experience; “harm” now includes annoying noises people make with their faces instead of the infliction of actual pain and suffering; even “survivor” is used indiscriminately to describe someone who’s experienced anything uncomfortable or upsetting. I am a survivor of dictionaries becoming ironically meaningless!

Within this language tradition, we're practically required to maintain a rotating and also ever-growing collection of forbidden words that demand to be taken seriously and to convince you they hurt you.

As soon as a new term is introduced, we take it, adapt it, viralize it, broaden it and, ultimately, redefine it altogether. Once it's redefined, those who redefined it are able to then accuse those using it with the original or more traditional meaning of being themselves anachronistic and prejudiced for either not knowing of the redefinition or for resisting it. See: “racism.” As Richard Hanania writes of the phenomenon of the redefinition of racism in particular,

As long as I’ve been alive, it’s been bad to be racist in America. But over the decades, the minimum definition of racism went from something like “hating people on account of their race” to “having a private preference for one’s own group over others” to “supporting policies that have a disparate impact on a protected minority” to “not actively struggling to make yourself antiracist.”

When everything is relative and nothing really matters and everyone stops caring, language becomes meaningless and the people don’t understand each other. People start to rely on irony and in-group jokes to make sense of their values and observations, and those are widely misunderstood by outsiders and even sometimes insiders, themselves. They also confuse the public with their terminally online terrorist manifestos.

Why are some of these words even considered slurs?

For a time, the primary word we used to describe the condition of being intellectually disabled3 was, of course, “retarded.” The shorthand term made sense because its root, “retard,” means to slow or delay development. “Retarded” simply described the literal condition of retarded brain development.

It became a slur not because we suddenly realized that it was an inherently offensive word that naturally demeaned those it described, but only after people started using it to insult people who were not actually intellectually disabled. Colloquial use of the word was not usually meant to insult the intellectually disabled, but to mock those whose behavior was so baffling or out of pocket that it was compared to someone acting irrationally because they couldn't help it. Most people would not actually refer to or call an intellectually disabled person “retarded” as an insult, because most people aren’t assholes in general. At least, not in person.

Of course, bullies everywhere are probably still happy to call an intellectually disabled person “retarded” in a mean-spirited way, as bullies and bigots of all stripes do that to literally any word, like we see with “Romani” in those Reddit threads populated by Europeans who pretend they aren’t racist. Sometimes “Jew” means “Jewish person”; sometimes it means (((Jew))). Sometimes “black” is used to neutrally describe someone's skin color or to differentiate them from someone else; sometimes the adjective is used as emphasis in a story about a time a black person did something objectionable to the storyteller. Apparently even “oy vey” isn't safe because some Twitter anti-Semites say it ironically now.4

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Anyway, “retarded” didn't just stop making sense one day; it was never inherently offensive or even meant to be. The only thing offensive about the word was that it became shorthand in popular culture for “dumb and crazy”5 after it became the neutral diagnosis for certain cognitive impairments. And regardless, anything that is stigmatized in society will continue to be stigmatized regardless of which new words we assign to them every 5-10 years. As Helen Pluckrose explains:

Yeah, this is the thing about language. We often try changing words which have acquired negative connotations to get rid of the negative connotations, but if the thing it refers to still has negative connotations, the new word will pick them up too.

“Retarded” was intended to be a kinder descriptor for intellectual disability than those that were currently in circulation, but soon became an insult. “Special needs” then made another attempt to have a kinder variation on the same concept and has never become such a direct insult. However, saying someone is ‘a bit special’ can now be used as insult and it is accordingly regarded as stigmatising.

This is also how “lame” and “colored” and even “black,” for a time, worked, when those things were more stigmatized. The terms themselves described, in a literal and neutral manner, the primary noticeable and contextually-relevant attribute of what they were referring to, whether it be someone's disability or their skin color. The descriptors fell out of favor and new ones were chosen once they inevitably became adopted by wider society as a way to insult people. The hatred or bigotry underlying the newly-forbidden words didn't disappear with their social acceptability, they simply adopted the new ones and used them in exactly the same way. When and if those bigotries changed, it was due to factors other than forced language adoption; it’s the culture itself that changes. Lather, rinse, repeat.

David Dennison talks about the return of “retarded” as a casual insult toward non-disabled people and whether we have the ability to knock its teeth out while we have the chance:

But the resurgence in popularity of the r-bomb, made possible by the waning ability of the hall monitor class to police online speech, presents us with a unique opportunity. We can fully rob this word of its power to wound. Not just for today, but in perpetuity. If we do it right, it will never come back. At least not as what it once was.

The alternative is to preserve it as a weapon. To let it keep its claws, and allow it to keep slashing at the innocent.

Continuing to give words the power to be career- and academia-ending weapons, to allow people’s lives to be ruined because they were a few months late updating their Newspeak vocab cheat sheets, is a preposterous waste of time, at best.

And, perhaps most importantly, we should be resilient enough people to not let mere words knock us over so easily. I don’t want to live in a society where everyone mistakes blunt rudeness for honesty, but I do want us all to increase our mental fortitude. We’ve let the reasonable inquiries of meaning and relativity turn us into sobbing piles of goo who can’t handle the slightest offense because since we've decided nothing means anything anymore, everything can mean anything and that's just too much.

What kind of person so mentally fragile will be able to fight in a real revolution, anyway?

Newspeak eats itself

While half the country seems happy to embrace the edgiest slurs that have resurfaced, whether because they genuinely enjoy using them or because maybe they just want to stick it to the defeated hall monitors, the other half continues to cling tightly to the “woke” era and its language policing.

The act of keeping and inventing new forbidden words to be defined as slurs uncovers an interesting blind spot6. The culture that introduced us to the forbidden words that are so old and commonly used in neutral ways that no one even knows they used to offend some people once is the same culture insisting upon language as descriptive rather than prescriptive. These are the same people who will get on Bluesky or Facebook and accuse you of ableism for correcting someone's incorrect usage of any given term because “if you understood what they meant, it was correct enough.”

So which is it, then? Are we to continuously cling to only certain, archaic definitions of old words forever, or are we to accept that the usage of these terms changes organically over time? Are we to believe that words are even allowed to shift organically, or must they all be politically engineered?

We will always be like this

WEIRDos in this day and age will seemingly always find a way to appropriate legitimate medical terms or neutral adjectives to insult their friends and enemies alike. What you want is not an eradication of ableism, but for people to be more polite to each other, and the way most of these people go about it is not effective.

If someone's speech really offends you, you would do well to consider a few things before running off to Bluesky to complain or banning them from your space to protect your peace or whatever. For one, did they actually mean it in an offensive way? You can usually tell. If they didn't seem to mean to cause offense and it's that important to you — or it's the kind of word that's become such a faux pas to say in polite company that you should probably do them a solid about and tell them they ought to know their audience — then you should consider politely informing them if you care about their reputation.

For two, how long ago did you learn the word was offensive? Is it actually offensive to you, or are you being benevolently offended on behalf of some other group you can't realistically represent? Are you actually doing a Latinx right now? Make sure the group you're committing cultural seppuku for actually wants your services.

I know I just said we will always be like this, but IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS

For those of us who just want to go five years without Merriam-Webster informing us that words like literally now literally mean the opposite of literally, or to learn that there's effectively no longer a word that definitively means “born female” without offending people who don't want to be reminded of human sexual dimorphism or the fact that their gender expression is obviously in the minority, or that the right has effectively redefined the meaning of “woke” and turned it into a noun as well as a slur, then... we have to just fight back.

I’m talking about innocent words, phrases, and gestures that have become problematic since around 2015 or so. No, I don't want to pitifully forfeit words and cultural traditions or “okay” hand symbols or even khakis, my least favorite pants in existence, or those completely ineffective but nicely ambient tiki torches, to white supremacists, either. I can think of nothing less dignified than allowing your sworn enemy to steal your language from you without so much as a fight and I'm embarrassed that so many on the left continue to do it.

While I join many in loathing the expansion of the word “literally,” I prefer it to the socially-engineered and astroturfed redefinition of “racism” and other bigotries consumed by Critical Theory because at least its increased misuse and eventual redefinition was organic. Merriam-Webster’s addition to the definition of “racism” didn’t come from the realization that culture had shifted and the word’s new or expanded definition had come from the culture itself; the dictionary was call out specifically by a recent college graduate to update it for accuracy, not common usage, which it was not at all at the time, and still isn’t. And it’s absurd to allow our language to be socially and often institutionally policed to such a degree that rolling your eyes and calling it Newspeak is hardly much of an exaggeration anymore. The point is to limit the ability to think and speak critically on certain topics or know which -asia we’re at war with today.

Some people have already taken it upon themselves to begin expanding the Overton Window of acceptable speech, at least in part to disarm these words of their thought-terminating power. While you’re not likely to see me spelling out the whole n-word or saying the “hard R,” I will continue to do my best to use terminology that I find appropriate while considering both other people’s sensibilities, my own authenticity, and the messages I wish to convey, on a case-by-case basis — as well as not worrying too much about using straightforward terms to describe things and not thinking too hard before I make a joke — in other words, respecting the intelligence of my audience and those I'm talking to. And I will probably continue occasionally saying “retarded,” at least in certain, similarly-minded company, because now that it has lost favor among those using it against actual disabled people, it really can be the perfect insult sometimes.

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Thanks to everyone who caught the livestream about feminism and feminization with and and me on Saturday, November 15! It was great to talk with both of them live and “face to face” for the first time (although Rohan insists on remaining a mystery, probably so as not to reveal his secret romantasy author identity). If you're not already subscribed to them both, go do it!

One thing about livestream conversations is that after your first one, you quickly learn that you won't really be sticking closely to any agenda you have planned because you end up going on endless tangents, and the tangents are half the fun, so you just go with it until you're out of time.

And that's the other thing: people also don't have the seventeen hours they would like to sit around hashing out ideas and pontificating online with each other, so some topics are necessarily missed (although stay tuned, as I’m sure we’ll do this again).

Anyway, what follows are my own thoughts on feminization and should not be attributed to Anuradha or Rohan!

I started writing about feminization not too long after everyone else did and the topic started dominating the discourse, but, as such, it was one of those topics that was promptly covered from every angle by just about everyone, so I found it difficult to find a topic unexplored or an opinion not already argued well enough.

One thing I realized before this livestream, though, was that it actually wasn't being covered as much by people like myself and Anuradha: decidedly not right-wing, ourselves anti- or post-feminist (whatever you want to call it), and current heterodox left-leaning thinkers.

So far, the pieces covering the topic of feminization disseminated most widely are covered by feminists or left-leaning writers who are either refuting the concept of feminization altogether or arguing its merits, or conservatives and those on the right agreeing with it, some to the extent that they openly advocate for restricting or outright banning women from certain roles or institutions, at least without close male supervision.

There's not much, however, coming from people on the ground in — or perpetually on the outskirts of — these institutions, whether it be in employment or in applying for grants and other opportunities for which checking certain diversity boxes has seemed to be a prerequisite for some time now. The most amplified voices are those largely not actually having experienced anything about which they’re confidently theorizing.

Male Flight

It seems the latest iteration of The Discourse™ was started, at least in part, with the more widespread1 acknowledgment that once women’s presence in an industry or group reaches a certain percentage, “male flight” occurs and men start leaving. If you ask many feminists, this is because of the misogyny of men not wanting to be associated with anything that looks or feels too feminine, or that female-coded jobs simply confer less status and therefore repel men who might otherwise excel in the role (or who used to, in times past).

To critics of feminism and the so-called feminization that we’re seeing, it’s because men don’t want to participate in the censorious nature of female-dominated spaces, and feel uncomfortable directly competing, or even arguing, with women, and so have decided to simply forfeit the match rather than fight what they see as a losing battle.

The vibe had already been shifting, but now it seemed we finally had permission to say it all out loud, only with none of the nuance demanded by men and other critics of the 2010s feminists who cried “toxic masculinity” at every slight.

What is “Feminization”?

What started this (most recent iteration of) harried chatter is an article called The Great Feminization by Helen Andrews. She writes:

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

Her thesis, and that of many others who agree, is that the entire problem we face now — a lack of truth-seeking in academia, science, therapeutic settings, and elsewhere; workplaces that focus on managing feelings and consensus above productivity; valuing elimination of harm, real or imagined, over more strategic material goals — is the result of women entering, and eventually coming to dominate, these institutions. She says later in the piece:

Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.

I have to agree with her main point here: the influx of, and domination by, women in certain fields is pretty intuitively a result of the thumb of DEI on the scale in academia and corporate recruitment practices2. It’s notable that, when people have the financial freedom to make employment decisions that suit them best, women still tend to enter feminine-coded fields while men continue to enter work in masculine-coded fields. Diversity recruiting efforts are clearly an influence in women's increased disproportionate presence in certain fields.

However, Andrews makes it clear that the issue, to her, isn’t just a more spiritual understanding of the neutral differences between “femininity” and “masculinity” and their roles in society, but the literal presence of women as people within these institutions.

Anuradha takes a different track and approaches the concepts of masculinity and femininity — and therefore feminization — on an ontological level rather than a literal one:

Feminization has been attributed to women dominating the workplace, but it’s not actually about women, nor is it merely about work.

When I speak about it, I refer to metaphysical poles that characterize our reality. We all have the masculine and feminine principles in us, but they are not tied to sex or gender per se. The ancients used gender as a metaphor for these poles. Institutional feminization isn’t about the dominance of women — it was happening far prior to their entry to the white collar workforce. Credentialism and managerialism are two illustrations.

[…]

Many people have noticed that affective management has replaced truth-seeking, but they misidentify women as the cause. Women just happen to be the best guardians of feminized norms and usually reflect metaphysically feminine qualities. But feminine qualities exist separately from the female sex.

Feminization is the transformation of institutions under affluence and managerialism toward affect over truth as the highest good. We have a professional class running those institutions, obsessed with preventing offense rather than defending the unpopular truth.

I find Anuradha's analysis of the situation — and use of more descriptive terms like affective management — better situates femininity and masculinity in the larger, more archetypal context in which they belong, rather than the frequently myopic view Andrews and others take.

The Flattening

Andrews simplifies the issue when she says that women entering the workforce and becoming the majority in certain institutions is the direct reason for the entropic rot and lack of public trust in these institutions. While she acknowledges that exceptions exist, she doesn’t hold back that she's talking about women when she discusses feminization, considering herself to be, of course, a rare exception; she’s very clear that this problem is to be blamed entirely on women and our participation in these institutions at levels above what she considers acceptable for continuing to operate on a masculine wavelength — the only one she finds appropriate for running any kind of institution.

Andrews cites a study concluding that more women than men think promoting an inclusive society is more important than free speech,3 and this is important: what kind of academic, media, or corporate environment can function properly without prioritizing truth and candor above all else? It’s her most salient argument because not valuing truth — especially in institutions whose credibility relies entirely on it, like academia and media — is actually quite bad, indeed. The oft-cited communication norms that are common among smaller social groups of women have expanded outside of friendship and mom groups and into the institutions of the country, and it's unironically done harm. In valuing feelings over truth, whose feelings were being prioritized and protected? How was it decided who would be eligible for sympathy and second chances? How did those left out of consideration fare?

Who Gets Hurt?

Much has been said about the victims of the feminization of our institutions, many of whom are men. As noted previously, when workplaces, industries, and fields of study begin to approach parity between the sexes, men tend to flee them altogether. Why? A number of reasons are cited: the stifling insistence on caring about everyone’s feelings which wastes valuable time that could be spent on actual work, a censorious environment which restricts research and progress, and so on.

Also affected in different ways are the strong-willed and assertively intelligent women for whom being outliers relative to what is expected of her will likely cause her much strife.

Feminization — and, importantly, its backlash — do affect more than just the people in the PMC world, and there are downstream effects. Like Anuradha and Rohan and I discussed, one of the most common refrains from those defending feminization and DEI is that “men had a 500 year head start.” Well, which men? Because none of us are 500 years old and we’re all competing, now, for the same resources that even sixty years ago were much more plentiful.

We’ll of course get back to a point where, no matter how strict and meritocratic a selection process is or finally becomes, a plane crash piloted by a man will elicit sympathy and horror while one piloted by a woman will elicit suspicion that women perhaps shouldn’t be flying airplanes. This is what we were trying to get away from! Not that long ago! But we can’t get away from that when we lower standards after women’s entrance into any given field, predictably lowering trust in the institution itself. Low social trust is bad. We also can't get there when the response to feminization is demonization of women or our archetypal traits as a whole. While the backlash will look different coming from women than it does coming from men, it will come easily and predictably.

To briefly state the obvious: the word itself — feminization — is too broad and too easy to slap on any random thing (like… toxic masculinity!) and is just, unfortunately, going to continue to be a problem and I don’t really think there’s anything we can do about that anymore.

The industrial revolution hastened the evolution of what “women's work” meant, but the reality of our world right now is that, with rare exceptions, everyone has to work. Even women. Especially women! Just like we have for pretty much our entire existence on this planet, everywhere. This need hasn’t changed, but how society is structured has.

Male Privilege, Toxic Masculinity, and the Backlash

We just watched broad gender-blame and collective punishment happen to men under the banner of “toxic masculinity” (even as feminists insisted it didn’t mean all men or all masculinity); you’d think there’d be more empathy in regards to what this kind of collective social punishment does to people, but that isn’t proving to be the case.

One of the primary complaints many men and women detractors had about the concept of male privilege in particular is that it mostly only describes the upper echelon of men — the ones who control entire companies, the ones in roles that have real societal power, the ones where the men themselves were born into wealth — that is, the concept of male privilege was routinely conflated with economic privilege within the very framework that defined the two concepts as such.

As far as “toxic masculinity” is concerned, the very people who cried “not all men!” apparently have the memories of goldfish and are, disappointingly but predictably, all too happy to apply the same kind of broad generalizations to an entire half of the human population when it suits them. The backlash has begun, and it’s far from close to being over.

As writes in the introductory piece in his “Dear Liberal White Ladies” series,

Resentment politics seems to be the chosen brand for this era of American life, and the people most resented right now are you. That means that even issues that affect people other than you are going to be in danger, just by virtue of their association with you.

In this piece, David predicts what the backlash to all this from men is going to look like and, in my observation, he’s pretty correct so far, as we see in Fiamengo’s assertion that all we can do is bar women from certain roles until we can figure out what the hell is going on:

It seems clear that, at the very least, women should be discouraged: for their own good and the good of our societies.

Girls should have it made clear to them from an early age that only the extremely talented and driven should even consider careers in politics, law, high tech, or academia. They should be warned about the moral character, inner strength, and self-discipline needed to occupy positions of public responsibility. The sacrifices required should be vividly outlined. The civilization-damaging realities of feminine propensities should be widely discussed, and female ingratitude, over-confidence, narcissism, vengefulness, and vainglory should be exposed, criticized, and damped down by teachers, mentors, and supervisors.

I would go further to say that women should be hindered, by law or at least by popular consensus, from leadership roles in key cultural domains. True, such an action would be discriminatory. It would mean that the talents of some able and public-minded women would not reach their full flourishing (though I would not bar women from lesser positions, operating under male leadership). It would mean frustration and a justified sense of injury for a few truly worthy women. But that would be a price well worth paying to reduce further feminization and to restore crucial bulwarks of our civilization.

It’s not hard to find people who openly agree with her or easily question whether or not she’s got a good point. And I get it: Janice Fiamengo does seem to be a dangerous and rather frankly irritating social presence and should probably be stopped and replaced with a man who won't get so emotional about this topic. I'm sure she'd be happy to sacrifice herself first, like Serena and her finger.4

Is Feminization Really All Bad?

I didn’t really want to bother with this subtopic because it feels redundant, but I want to address a few things here. Missing in this discourse is any discussion whatsoever of the virtues of femininity, in institutions or otherwise — we’re really only getting an onslaught about how awful and even socially destructive most of our traits actually are. I know we just came off a long stretch of being told that mothers are the height of everything pure and good in the world, and that's gotta count for something despite its frequent disingenuous origins, but come on now. It’s a little much, guys. We didn’t forget how much you hated it not that long ago, yourselves, when the virtues of masculinity were overlooked or denied altogether.

talks a lot about her life as a “girlboss” and unabashed romantic. In a recent essay, she explains corporate life, essentially, and why certain “feminine” methods of managing it have actually improved the experience of working a corporate job not only for women (and men), but for the goals of the company. As TCR notes:

Yes, often there is a forced niceness in corporate work culture. But I think that existed in Caesar’s army too. Would the British Empire have conquered the world if all the ammunition was being used to shoot each other? Your workplace doesn’t pay you to feud, war, sword-fight or otherwise maim your co-workers. That is besides the very point of co-working — which is co-operation to achieve the goals of your employer.

A lot of this discussion has been framed around the negative attributes typical feminine modes of communication and management have affected institutions, but not much about how masculine ones have, or what the virtues of a feminized workplace might be (in fact, no one can seem to agree on what qualities can even be considered masculine or feminine in an office setting). Andrews herself now-infamously couldn’t answer a similar question posed to her by Leah Libresco Sargeant, in a debate moderated by NYT columnist Ross Douthat, about what some feminine virtues are and dumped Kamala levels of word salad on her instead:

Well, just to finish that particular thought before I answer that question: It’s a little bit feminine, honestly, to focus on my likes and dislikes ——

[later]

Yeah, I don’t really have an answer to that one. I think it is probably likely, just as a matter of prediction, that you will get more workplaces that are predominantly male or predominantly female in the future I envision, where there’s no longer thumbs on the scale. Whether that will be good for men and women interacting, I don’t really know. I don’t think I have an opinion.

The reason I think it’s important to ask these questions and consider them seriously is because in no peaceful reality will women simply exit workplaces, academia, politics, or public leadership in general en masse, rendering the problem over, without, at minimum, seriously good incentives. Even then, some women's work really is their passion, and they're good at it. You won't get rid of them without a fight. There is no solution to “feminization” that is actually workable in practice aside from the benefits of restoring — or introducing — meritocracy to our institutions. Until or unless the economy and the way we structure family and work life changes, women simply have to work. There is no getting around this — at least, not in ways that would make women happy or be any easier for men, who would then be required to make a lot more money than they do now.

What Now?

Andrews recognizes that yanking women back to the 19th century isn’t a very good idea:

As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out.

Feminization is a concept worth discussing, and Andrews’ piece helped take it out of niche circles and shed the light of day on it, forcing us all to confront one cause of the institutional rot and societal entropy we mostly all agree is happening. One cause is, in fact, the adoption and proliferation of so-called feminine communication and affective management norms. A noted virtue of appropriately feminized environments that differ from the maligned others are, like TCR describes, often simply the adaptations we must make, as a diverse population with decreasing trust between participants, to keep civilization running smoothly.

I ultimately think that this monocausal explanation for “wokeism” or the cultural and institutional rot we experience is too simple, but that feminization is a valid piece of that puzzle, even if I wish, in vain, that we would call it something else. The best we can do is keep talking about it without perpetuating annoying stereotypes among those who can’t be expected to look into the subject beyond the term itself, using language like Anuradha lays out like “affective management.”

In the end, Anuradha’s, Helen Pluckrose’s, and even Andrews' eventual calls to create a culture of true meritocracy, discipline, and rationality are the only ones that make sense. We can’t have any more thumbs on any more scales. For example, if I can't do the required number of push-ups, maybe I shouldn't join the Army, or maybe I should push myself harder. Some standards make sense and should not be eroded for a greater sense of ineffectual fairness. Like Helen Pluckrose says,

Liberalism’s answer must be the same to both: no collective blame, no moral hierarchies of sex, race, or belief. The goal is not to re-masculinise society or re-feminise it, but to re-liberalise it and restore the principles that hold messy, pluralistic human beings to common standards of reason, fairness, and freedom.

I think that's the only way forward.

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I was reminded of something today from a recent note that posted.

“Just swim faster,” she says to the woman who tied for fifth place with Lia Thomas, a trans woman competing in a swim meet with cis women, some years ago.

Whatever your feelings on trans women competing against cis women in college or other sex-segregated sports, this kind of response is mean-spirited, flies wholly against the ostensible goals of progressivism to be fair and equitable and not personally attack opponents based on immutable characteristics, and is also weirdly common as a genre. The tweet from AOC is a common type of “gotcha” from this crowd, and it isn’t new.

Coincidentally enough, while searching through Google Photos for something unrelated the other day, I came across a bunch of screenshots from a conversation I had sometime in 2016 with some Facebook friends (all of whom have, at this point years later, either blocked me or been blocked by me) about something in the same vein:

This one really pissed me off.

See, for a long time now, people on the left who care about economics and the working class and think a myopic focus on identity politics is a distracting waste of time when used as a bludgeon to shut up productive discussion about material realities on the ground have been disparaged as “class reductionists” who don’t actually care about the plight of marginalized people and the discrimination we face as it pertains to our inborn characteristics. Us Bernie Bros were accused of it constantly before the 2016 election, and hints of it can be seen in the simple fact that we were called Bernie Bros, completely erasing the legions of women (and POC!) who supported Bernie because the Hillary stans wanted him out of the race and knew they could just slap “racist and sexist” on him and his supporters to drag him down.

When I was a bit louder about my opinions on Facebook back in the olden days of Trump’s first electoral run and eventual win, I really got into it with the guy who posted the above dumbass tweet, and some of the other commenters.

I responded:

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Perhaps you have heard of the very exciting1 portmanteau called “mankeeping,” wherein the woman in a heterosexual relationship is her husband or cohabitating boyfriend’s only friend and emotional support on top of being, essentially, his live-in housekeeper and personal assistant. Unfortunately/predictably, many mainstream feminists (of the heteropessimist variety) are sensationalizing it as a universal heterosexual experience while detractors dismiss it as overblown or entirely fabricated. As usual, I see truth in both perspectives.

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Like all of these buzzwords, they contain some truths that even some men will agree with that many women can point and nod to, immediately conjuring an image of at least one man she’s been with who was or is like this. For some women, it’s every man, because she doesn’t know how to get out of her attraction pattern problem and so she naturally assumes it must be all of them and inserts these new words into her vocabulary instantly, grateful they exist.

(This woman needs to recalibrate her understanding of her own type, but I digress.)

The kind of man who needs “keeping” is not every man, of course, nor is it probably even most men. Instead, at the risk of neutralizing my language too much to make it sound less mean2, I present to you my theory that this is less about men and what they’re failing to do, or women and what new nonsense we’re scheming, and more about specific personality types trying to live a kind of life together that they are not actually well-suited for.

In a traditional3 family setup — increasingly rare these days due to economic and other factors — the stereotypical male tendency to be blind to certain messes, be clueless about the kids’ routines, and not care about interior design while he goes off and uses that mental energy at work is actually perfectly complementary to the stereotypical female role of managing the home, the children, finances, and family and social calendars instead of working a full-time job outside of the home. Those people work well together because their personalities and natural priorities complement the other's and are suited to their circumstances. Maybe she occasionally complains about his socks on the floor or the messes he leaves in the kitchen, but it isn’t terribly consequential because she doesn't have to get up and go to a job she hates every morning before cleaning up the socks and the kitchen. That is her job, and her compensation — her bills paid, her family supported, stability — makes up for the lack of kitchen and laundry help.

Women joining the workforce en masse changed a lot about the way we live and how we get along and accept the quirks of human nature. Women could be financially independent and avoid becoming stuck in abusive or unhappy relationships with men because she had no other way to support herself and her family without his income, which was a necessary improvement for women and children. Unfortunately, long-term, it also led to more supply on the labor side, contributing to employers to easily cutting wages, salaries, and benefits, no longer needing to pay a “family wage” to a man whose wife was also now expected to contribute financially to the household. But, as is old news by now, women kept doing the bulk of the housework and childcare, anyway, despite working outside the home almost or just as much as their husbands. No one likes to feel like they’re consistently pulling more weight than is fair, and so women complained (and are still complaining).

But not all women. In fact, many cannot relate to these complaints at all, sometimes because they are part of the aforementioned type of complementary relationship and don't see how anyone else's could be so different. Some consider themselves lucky for it, others consider everyone else liars for it4. YMMV. But what’s the difference between these types of couples? Are the men just more domesticated in the relationships without this conflict? Is that really all it takes, for the men to change, like most of the thinkpieces conclude? Or is it that women, who invent absurd and impossible new standards out of thin air and create these problems ourselves, need to change, like the anti-thinkpieces conclude?

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I don't think it's necessarily always either of them.

If you have an account with an algorithm-based video feed anywhere, you have probably know something, however accidentally, about attachment styles. Attachment styles were originally used in a therapeutic context to describe how a person relates to others, usually influenced by early childhood experiences. Now I'm no expert, but there are a few different attachment styles, and the two most commonly discussed in these relationship videos and self-help books are anxious and avoidant, probably because they famously seem to clash the most loudly.

In the households where these battles over domestic labor, the mental load, and mankeeping originate, it seems the men tend to be the avoidant ones while the women tend to be the anxious ones, and this tracks with the stereotypes we tend to invoke when we complain about the opposite sex: men aren’t forthcoming with their emotions, they’re derpy or neglectful in the face of someone else showing emotion, they are not nurturing or good caretakers, they are somehow clutter-blind. Women, meanwhile, are emotionally unpredictable, hard to read, make irrational decisions for attention, and are impossible to please with ever-changing goalposts.

I think it’s honestly to be expected that avoidant men and anxious women will bicker endlessly with each other about things like distribution of labor, childcare, downtime, and all other things domestic; they don’t know how to trust the other’s perception of how life even works, let alone how to navigate and manage it together. They are diametrically opposite in terms of communication styles and it’s like pulling teeth to get either of them to see past their own walls and fears. But is this persistent dynamic we keep hearing about new? Is it really male entitlement or women’s perpetual victimization of themselves? Or has it always been there, and maybe just better managed before the shift in how domestic life usually looks for a lot of people?

It seems likely that our environments help to shape these attachment styles, and can also help to break them.

For people stuck in this relationship dynamic, it can feel impossible to resolve because the people involved seem to be talking past each other. Personally, I had never really experienced this particular relationship dynamic in the past; for one thing, I was the messy one when I was younger5, to the annoyance of my neat-freak boyfriends at the time. But as I grew out of that particular habit, later relationships were with people with living habits more closely aligned with mine, so we didn’t have a problem. I was even annoyed back then with the same thinkpieces (they are evergreen): Why would you even get into a relationship with someone so clearly incompatible with you? I would think. I couldn’t understand how they’d even let it get that far to begin with.

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Then, years later, around the time that my then-boyfriend, now-husband and I were about to move in together, we were plotting our packing strategy and I looked around his bedroom and said, “listen, when we move in together, I cannot live —” I gestured around at the piles of laundry and guitars and other various man-things haphazardly surrounding us — “like this.” Now, this isn’t one of those “complain about your husband” TikToks, so I will skip the list of domestic-duty incompatibilities we experienced for many years and go straight to the part about how we resolved this mismatch for the time being and how it relates to these cyclical man-blaming labor “epidemics.”

Two years ago, I quit my job to train for something in a new field. I did a few different things in service of this, but none of them took up much time during the day, and keeping up the housework and various domestic admin tasks were part of the deal of me not working and my husband being the sole breadwinner for a while. In an instant, and I am not hyperbolizing here, any frustration I felt that mimicked that of the evergreen thinkpieces dissolved, having shed one official job and making the unofficial one full-time. It was labor that I didn’t enjoy when it was tacked onto my regular workday, but as primary labor, it became more meaningful, and I also had more time to myself to pursue other projects (like this newsletter).

Importantly, when it comes to marriage satisfaction in general, having the freedom and time to pursue your own passions is incredibly important because it cultivates a sense of gratitude, and with gratitude come displays of that gratitude, which are important in a marriage and dry up quickly when you end up in the kind of relationship dynamic that makes you nod violently along with op-eds about “hermeneutics.”

I could pursue interests and hobbies that I didn’t have time for before, and all of the bills were paid without me needing to procure more fodder for essays about crappy jobs. The gratitude that inspired made me want to do things like perfect my husband’s favorite carrot cake recipe, or actually put on something cute instead of staying in pajamas all day, or think to put on his favorite music before he got home or even light that candle I hate because it smells like burnt butter toffee that he bafflingly loves. You know, little things like that. Stuff you don’t do when you’re pissed off because you’ve been the only one to do the dishes and clean the litter box all week after stressful workdays and no time for yourself.

Now, it would be absurdly tone deaf for me to suggest to other women or overwhelmed mothers out there simply quit their jobs to relieve this particular burden; my situation was, and is, privileged and unique (and ultimately temporary), and one-income households are simply not feasible for most families right now (although there are ways to help make this possible). And anyway, I still have to go back to work. That’s also not to say that the stay-at-home wife/mom life is even good for every woman or family even if it is economically possible; The Feminine Mystique spoke to a whole generation of women for a reason and having the ability to be financially independent is an inarguable necessity for women just as much as it is for men.

It is to say that, when the household-related labor is someone’s primary job instead of a necessary, asymmetrical addition to the full-time labor they already perform elsewhere, it can become less of a chore to resent and become more like meaningful work to take pride in. And, knowing that children generally fare better with more time with one or both parents during the day, and that mothers generally want to work less and stay home more, it seems sensible to see what can be done to help make all of this a reality for the betterment of just about everyone.

My armchair analysis is that this shift in the way we relate to each other domestically since women’s increasing presence in the workforce is the result of a bunch of people who are not biologically wired to deal with the socioeconomic realities of the world we’re living in trying to adjust to our relatively new expectations and failing miserably. We just aren’t yet evolutionarily caught up to where technology has taken us, and our most important relationships are suffering for it.

If you look at the Netherlands right now, you might conclude that the best balance is somewhere in the middle, with more mothers (and even many fathers) working part-time. The Dutch government supports and subsidizes this to an extent that would piss off most libertarian-minded types in the US, but I think even more traditional conservatives could be swayed on certain proposals, especially if they can be argued to encourage more people to start or grow their families. , Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, explains how the Netherlands is succeeding at this in her article about the benefits of more parents, especially mothers, working part-time. From her essay:

You might be wondering how the Netherlands manages its economy with so many part-time workers. In fact, per capita GDP is quite high in the Netherlands, on par with Germany, France, and Denmark, and Dutch labor productivity is near the top among peer OECD nations. This is because Dutch workers tend to work efficiently, and labor force participation is quite high. In the U.S., many women leave the workforce entirely when their kids are young because work-family balance is an impossibility; in contrast, 75% of mothers work in the Netherlands, one of the highest rates of female labor participation in the world. Having more moms overall in the work force helps to offset the fact that many of them are working fewer hours.

The essay is informative and insightful and worth a read.

While Saxby is talking about the work/life balance more broadly, I think some version of this Dutch approach would also take a lot of pressure off couples with this anxious and avoidant dynamic and the recurring relational and social issues that accompany it. There would be more dedicated time to domestic tasks, making them less tedious, part of the day instead of an intrusion on precious free time. You both have time for more focused parenting and independent, creative projects and dates. You don’t resent your husband as much anymore because you actually have time to breathe and live, and importantly, it feels more fair, like your time and contributions are also valuable and being acknowledged which, often, can be a pretty big part of the resentment in the first place.

So what’s my proposed solution? Well, I hate to say it, but vote for people who want to make this happen and press them to do so in an economically and socially-sustainable way. Pretty boring, really, but that’s kind of how things get done, isn’t it?

In the meantime, if couples stuck in this dynamic want to escape their dysfunction, contempt, and unease with one another and rearranging employment situations isn’t an option yet, there simply must be some compromise. Men must step up at home the way women have had to step up outside of it in order to contribute financially to their households. Sure, some women could stand to be nicer in their approach, we could lower our standards in certain inconsequential areas, etc. We all have a part to play, but it must be played by everyone involved. Otherwise we’ll keep seeing these thinkpieces detailing exactly what the problems are from her perspective, and we’ll keep seeing counter-thinkpieces from men saying they have no idea what happened and how they are bitter and angry that their wives divorced them because he wouldn’t stop leaving dirty glasses on the counter.

We can probably do better than that!

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Remember when people publicly berated their friends for not changing their Instagram profile pictures to black squares for George Floyd? Of course you do, we were all there. And anyway it's not like that really stopped; we may be able to get away with saying "retarded" once in awhile now, but cancel culture (which totally never existed in the first place) is still a thing in pretty much all the old familiar circles. It was only weeks ago that I heard people talking about how completely baffling it is that there are people posting online about things other than Gaza before they told me about their plans to go see the latest Marvel movie later that week. How can people just act like everything is normal when there's a genocide happening?! No, not that genocide. Not that one, either. No, goddamnit, this is the one we're instructed to drop everything for right now! Stop distracting me.

I've already read two and a half essays now about how it was rude and racist for Taylor Swift to release an album when stuff is happening. For one thing, she's a billionaire; ‘nuff said. For two, why is this pop icon, known for trite, banal lyricism about her past romantic relationships, still making the genre of music she's been known for making her whole life when stuff is happening? Doesn't she know stuff is happening? Why is this album, which is named The Life of a Showgirl, about the life of a showgirl instead of about how awful Trump is? She's only publicly mentioned politics — which is obviously absolutely required for anyone in the completely unrelated profession of musical entertainment! — like, three times in the past several years! Why isn't Taylor Swift a radical insurrectional anarchist?? And to think, getting married at a time like this? To a man? With a dick?! Do 👏 better 👏 Taylor 👏!

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Personally, I don’t let myself enjoy anything while stuff is happening. I have to make sure that I’m always doing something about the stuff that’s happening, and you should, too — for every second of every day.

The first thing I do after my land acknowledgements each morning is go on a nice, long walk around my polyamorous anarchist neighborhood and get a cup of whichever the most ethical coffee is this week from River, my favorite nonbinary baristx, and then set off to find a Nazi to punch. This is something I learned was required of me back in 2016 and, while I've gotten my ass kicked numerous times because I'm 105lbs and I don't know how to fight, I know it's important for me as a privileged cishet white colonizer to literally stomp oppression when I see it.

When you set off to start punching your own Nazis, you might think it's hard sometimes to figure out who is a real Nazi and who's just a regular liberal since they're pretty much identical. Don't worry, though: the intersectional trans-affirming feminist antiracists told me that if you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds, so it's not all that important that you aim correctly. Liberals generally approve of things like free speech, which is inherently fascistic since the principle allows for people other than me to say mean things to people who might resemble, or actually be, me. And if they're wearing a red hat, don't even bother reading it. They know what they did. They're literally asking for it.

After I fulfill my Nazi-punching quota for the day, I put on my face mask, get on my fixed gear bicycle, and ride down to the state capitol building to throw Bottle Baddies1 at passersby because terrorizing my Democratic state government is the best way to ensure an end to violence since they're responsible for the genocide in... wait, which one are we performatively caring about right now again?

Anyway, I'm no violent fascist but I do think anyone who agrees with them deserves to die, and I will punch my own mother in the face2 if it’s necessary to prove my virtue to the kinds of people who would get me fired from my job if they knew I thought that one Robin Thicke song was catchy. Related, one of my boyfriends just said he thinks Ezra Klein made a couple good points in that recent podcast he did with Hasan X. DiAngelo, and I'm having a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that he will need to be put down soon.

I know I shouldn't valorize fascists, but reader, I do love him. However, to atone for my misplaced affection for this latent fascist, I will commit to only dating transmasc folx in the future so I can be sure this will never happen again, since trans people are guaranteed to have the most correct politics by virtue of having been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. I don't need those Redwoods in my life anymore, anyway, since gender is a construct and genitals don't matter. Cishet women don't need all that. Heterosexuality is a social construct! We must stop centering white supremacist cishetero patriarchy! They say if you keep repeating it, vulvas become more appealing. I'm still waiting but I'm sure it'll happen soon. I would hate to be a genital fetishizer.

After I get home from Bottle Baddie throwing, I have a mandatory house meeting with my 12 roommates to discuss whose turn it is to load the dishwasher. Since everything is decided using a consensus model, these daily meetings can take up quite a lot of time, but that's what real democracy looks like, and important decisions can't be made without some toil. No one was willing to agree to take on the dishes, so we couldn't reach a decision and the sink is still full. Three of the housemates were kicked out, though, for speaking before the one BIPOC in the house (xhe's 1/16th Cherokee). We're out here being the change we want to see, and that includes instituting a progressive stack at all times.

Finally, after finally eating a late-night vegan muffin I got from the Whole Foods dumpster, I log into my OnlyFans account to make the last of this month's rent. I put on my lacy black corset, fishnet stockings, and my favorite collar and I call my boyfriend in and let him have his way with me while my subs watch. I feel alive for the first time all day and again lament the impending demise of this good wood. But I can't despair, for this privileged meatsuit was built to kill fascists. This is punching up.

After the last of rent comes in and we clean ourselves up, I kick my boyfriend out so I can have my allotted pre-bed half hour to think quietly to myself about selfish, bourgeois things like my own life. The lottery is tomorrow and with everything going on, I just hope I'm not the one chosen. I hate these lotteries, but they're necessary to ensure we're doing something about all the stuff happening. While I don't want to be the next one chosen to pointlessly light myself on fire to protest the genocide in... wherever... if I am, at least I can take comfort knowing that my comrades will take on the extra emotional labor of comforting my libfash boyfriend before euthanizing him on my behalf. It was my duty, after all.

The world must stop when bad things happen, because bad things are bad and it's insane(ly racist) to want to do anything but dwell on it all, especially if there's nothing you can realistically do to make a material impact. You can always do something to fight fascism. Have you tried screaming at your elderly second cousin on Facebook to tell him Kamala is a Kop? The options are endless. Remember: it's not performative slacktivism as long as you get anxious sometimes or something. That's called neurodivergence. We all have an important part to play in the #resistance, but remember: you are allowed no joy except for that which comes incidentally from resisting fascism.

If I've learned anything from a lifetime of optimistic idealism, it's that the cynics were right. It is always 1937 and something is always happening, which means nothing else can ever happen. It ain't hard to see.

published a great rundown of some of the root causes of wtf happened over the past ten or fifteen years. She observed that the culprits of this massive shift in how we date and interact publicly with one another are not, in fact, Women At Large, but a smaller subset of misanthropic turbo-introverts (I’ll break from CHH here and Eurydice below and add my own observation/opinion that this subset of people were mostly of the left-wing intersectional feminist and critical theory enthusiast variety) to whom the internet bestowed too much social power:

I kept seeing heterosexual women’s preferences boiled down to generalizations that felt really oddly specific to a small cohort of people who clearly needed to work through some personal issues: all men annoy me, I don’t want to interact with them, I just want to be left alone.

Cleverly cloaked in the language of intersectional feminism and critical theory, they managed to convince many of the reasonable men of the world who were guilty of little more than being awkward sometimes that they should never approach a woman under any circumstances. Naturally, only the decent guys listened, and now they’ve got PTSD about it and only legit creeps aren’t afraid to hit on women anymore1.

There were some objections to some of CHH’s analysis, though, when it came to her interpretation of the impact MeToo and third-wave “Jezebel Feminism” had on your average, non-creepy dude. I thought these were well-reasoned critiques and, notably, they all describe the same kind of mood and fear hanging over their various communities during that era. For example:

Why does anyone disagree about what happened?

I appreciated MeToo in the beginning, back when it was less of a blunt social weapon with which to destroy your enemies and more of an act of solidarity like, “yes, I’ve also experienced this definitely-bad-but-not-illegal behavior from men; let’s share stories so people can learn how common it is” moment in social media history. I was even pleasantly surprised to hear from a couple guy friends telling me early on that it made them realize how uncomfortable some of their actions toward women had been in the past, and how they regretted having behaved that way. It felt like progress because it was progress. Like, literally exactly the kind of progress normal women wanted to see from MeToo.

It wasn’t long before it went off the rails, but I don’t need to provide yet another breakdown of what followed. You can read this essay I wrote about it last year if you want my complete thoughts on the origins of the mess we’ve found ourselves in today:

We all interpret these cultural phenomena through the lenses of our own experiences, what we witness in our social circles, and what we absorb through our broader local and regional cultures, and it makes sense that some people might not see the bulk of what others in different cultural milieus experienced. It is easy to see how many people might have thought of MeToo and its influence as pretty much beginning and ending with the Hollywood creeps and maybe getting a little overzealous in the process, sweeping up people like Aziz Ansari and Al Franken, which was unfortunate, but assumed not to be the norm by people who didn’t personally know anyone affected. It was assumed that any man caught up in it probably deserved it and not examined further by many people.

Following CHH, published a bonus essay weighing in on this topic in “Navigating Male Binary Thinking.” She expands in a slightly different direction and theorizes that the communication differences between men and women have something to do with this, which I think is a useful way to frame much of this discussion. Men and women often do communicate in markedly different ways with different goals in mind2 and this is a constant source of misunderstanding and frustration between the sexes, so it’s important not to leave it out of discussions like these when how to talk to each other is such a huge part of what is successful and what isn’t:

Sometimes, the reason what women say to men seems confusing is due to feminine preference for hyperbole. Sometimes, it’s bad advice because it forgets to account for poor calibration. I think both of those failure modes played a role in this story, by the way. Sometimes, though, it’s odd because it’s rooted in an effort to manage male black-and-white thinking. The would-be-advisor starts by assuming said advice will be extended to the most extreme possible version of what it could be interpreted to mean. From there, the advisor chooses their preferred failure mode: when the dumbest and least-skilled person you can imagine encounters this advice, what mistake would you prefer that they make?

{…T]hat advice would be: leave me alone, it’s more polite.

Emphasis mine.

I don’t think this is an unreasonable observation to make (the female hyperbole or the literal male assumptions), nor do I think it’s really a controversial one. CHH also talks about this in an earlier essay “‘Expecting More’ Only Works if You Currently Expect Too Little” (during a broader point about how some women are continuing to invent absurd standards for men they meet on the apps and what causes this):

But there’s an unfortunate phenomenon wherein dating advice only reaches the people who don’t really need it, because people prefer advice that allows them to do more of what they already like doing. When men are told to “respect women,” the only men who listen to it are the ones who were already respectful to the point of being afraid of women. They conclude they need to respect women even more, by no longer speaking to them at all. Meanwhile, the men who catcall and harass women continue to do so because “respect women” doesn’t mean anything to them.

Emphasis mine.

It’s easy to see how we might consider, from this example that almost everyone can agree is probably a real thing, that men and women do generally communicate and interpret information they relay and receive differently.

There are also more nuanced points to this more specific topic of how dating has changed that make it harder to boil down strictly to communication differences, as points out:

To summarize: women’s communication styles are not predictable across the population and men have to make decisions based on the worst case scenario as a result, and the worst case scenario has been elevated in recent years.

In my experience, it is true that many men often struggle to properly interpret what some women are communicating to them because our communication style can generally be less direct. Despite this new “hermeneutic labor” thing I guess we’re talking about now, men having a hard time decoding what women say is a trope as old as time. Plenty of men will also tell you that they are but simple creatures who communicate bluntly and say what they mean and don’t know why we have to think about people’s feelings all the goddamned time. We all mostly agree that these stereotypes are rooted in at least some truth, so in my opinion, we ought to just accept them as mostly reality and figure out how to work with it rather than fight over which style is better or how to eliminate one in favor of the other.

I don’t want to assign positive or negative value to either method of communication because I think they are both fairly innate and develop the way they do for myriad useful reasons and both have their positives and negatives. I mostly want to simplify this and say that we all need to work harder to understand some of these probably-mostly-unchangeable differences and do our best consider our audience when we speak.

Do I have a point?

I’m getting to it, but I just find all this very funny when I think about The Discourse of about fourteen years ago when I was blogging on Wordpress and told a story about the stalkers that female gas station employees tend to attract:

You see, if you're a gas station employee and female, you are guaranteed at least one stalker. The Stalker is someone who comes in to buy his daily 3.2% alcohol 40oz malt liquor and two packs of Marlboro reds, and notices the new cashier-- you! He kindly informs you that he finds you pretty (swooooon), and on the spot declares you to be his favorite cashier. You smile and say thanks as you take his smelly, wadded-up singles and give him his change. He leaves.

Cut to the next week. Since your first meeting with your new stalker, he's managed to memorize the days you work, and which shifts. He now makes sure that he waits until you're there to buy his smokes and watered-down booze, and stands off to the side while you ring up other people, to ensure that he gets some face time with you. You still naively think it's a little cute, and maybe he's kind of gross, but mostly, he seems harmless, so you just deal with it.3

Cut to a month later. Dude no longer gives a shit that you don't want to give him your number, or that you have a boyfriend. He continues trying his best to convince you to go on a date with him and his Marlboros and 40s. You complain about this to your coworkers, who tell you about their own stalkers, who are nearly identical to yours. Next time you see Stalker Man coming up to the store, you announce to your coworkers, "I'm going to hide in the cooler! If he asks, I'm dead." Your coworker complies. You do the same for her when her stalker comes in an hour later. You notice, resentfully, that your male coworkers lack stalkers.

I don’t know how many of you were around for the feminist and MRA blogosphere days of the late aughts and early 2010s, but the responses I got to this article when I originally published it were very critical of my description of these men and my and other women’s experiences with, and reactions to, them. I don’t want to just paste that entire essay in here (it’s not long, just go read it), but after describing those gas stations stalkers, I talked about a male gas station clerk who was obsessed with my sister and how she, and later I, dealt with him.

The majority of the comments4 were from men, angry that I would discuss these guys so callously, or even criticize their behavior completely anonymously on my blog, because they were probably autistic5. The entire basis for being angry about my story about the pushy men who couldn’t take a hint6 was that I didn’t understand that the men who hit on women in public were likely autistic rather than probably relatively confident, “neurotypical” men who were also sometimes relentlessly obnoxious and didn’t understand the female experience around these things, and sometimes from a culture in which this kind of behavior was considered the norm.

The idea was so absurd to me because, if these guys really believed all of these men were autistic, they clearly had no concept of the sheer quantity of attention that young women get just existing in public in some areas. The widespread opinion in this microcosm then, from the mouths of men themselves, was that many men were, in fact, bad at making social distinctions, and that we should operate under the assumption that they all are.

The point, at last

If you don’t exist in that world — the world of a young woman who works downtown or goes to the gas station or uses public transportation by herself in a city — then the idea that a random man approaching you for seemingly complimentary reasons can be annoying just sounds ungrateful, if not hostile.

Further, if you are a normal, nice7 man whose male friends are also not the type to harass or otherwise mistreat women, the idea that those men are out there to such a degree that all of the women you know constantly complain about them might seem exaggerative or delusional. After all, you never see this behavior in the wild yourself, and when you approach women, you don’t behave like a rabid skunk (or whatever creature is unusually horny, idk), so they must simply be misinterpreting his behavior due to no fault of his, or maybe (probably) they’re just mean bitches.

Likewise, a woman whose female friends are not the type to freak out at men who approach her in public, or who do not complain about things like needing to reject a normal, respectful man she wasn’t into, or who do not take pleasure in humiliating men for sport, may not realize that there actually is a whole world out there where subsets of women do act like this. Therefore, these women think men who complain about these women are exaggerating, or maybe they know the way they treat women is disrespectful and are just mad they can’t get way with it, or maybe they do need “educating” because they actually don’t realize that they are behaving in socially unsavory ways... or, they’re actually all autistic like those guys fourteen years ago claimed.

...What really got me about those insistent autism claims was the suggestion that there just existed this massive cohort of autistic men cold-approaching women left and right in 2011, so frequently that women everywhere were overwhelmed by it. I mean, really?

And now we have doubts that anyone ever cold-approached anyone back in the day8, bringing us full-circle.

What I'm trying to say is that a lot of us are really, usually unintentionally, clueless about the experiences of the opposite sex, and this is sometimes due to deliberate ignorance, but not always or, I'd wager, even often. But regardless of our intentions, we collectively aren’t great at listening to each other, especially in the most heated of cultural moments.

That said, it’s pretty encouraging to see so many people currently discussing this heated topic with so much openness and curiosity and willingness to engage thoughtfully from all sides with their perspectives and experiences right now. Lots of good points being made and experiences shared all around.

Of course we’ll probably still be arguing about all this forever, but moments of hope amid interesting discourse are always nice.

Cheers.

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Standards and their discontents

The phrase “lowering standards” in regards to dating has always rubbed me the wrong way. It sounds insulting to everyone involved: to yourself for needing to admit that you’re not “good enough” for the people you aspire to be with, and to those for whom you now must “settle” because that means they are also not “good enough” for people “better” than you. No one likes the implications of “lowering standards,” no matter which side of the equation they're on.

(Were those enough scare quotes for you? I have more!)

It sounds unnecessarily harsh to me, but I think the underlying reason I don’t like it is that it’s not actually about raising or lowering anything: it’s about recalibrating.

Recalibrating, not lowering

writes prolifically about her experiences in the NYC dating scene, and she offers a lot of great insights about the lessons she’s learned and how she’s applied them to her own life to better her chances of getting good matches and having enjoyable, repeat dates with guys she really likes. A recent piece of advice she offered was spot-on and actually illustrates very well the difference between “lowering” standards and recalibrating them.

I want to expand on these ideas.

To women, Lana suggests:

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a man with a PhD, but if what you really want is someone who can challenge you intellectually and you’re having trouble finding enough phds, try filtering by asking better screening questions to suss this out.

What she’s getting at here is that your requirement for a PhD might not really be about the official document confirming that he conducted a certain amount of original research and then successfully defended his dissertation; it might just be the best way you can think of right now to filter for who you really want to meet, which are thoughtful men who challenge you intellectually, and that perhaps different filters would show more of these men.

She gives a similar example for men and some of their potentially misguided expectations:

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a woman with a low body count, but if what you actually want is a woman without STDs who won’t cheat, focus on women who want monogamy and get tested + ask questions about how past relationships ended when the time is appropriate. Look more for indicators of integrity and honesty in other parts of her life.

Again, a more thoughtful substitute for a nearly impossible filter that’s as unlikely for men to find as it is for women to locate men who match their statistically impossible height and income preferences. A filter whose results may not tell the whole story, or which might not even get you what you’re really looking for in the first place. Like Lana summarizes,

The issue with both is that we develop filtering criteria that may not align with what actually makes us happy in a relationship - we also often confuse symbols for the thing it’s symbolizing.

Emphasis mine.

How much do looks really matter?

Appearance seems to be the trickiest one because, generally speaking, what we’re attracted to physically seems to be more innate than anything else, but aesthetic preferences, too, can be recalibrated with some success. To go back to this insufferable topic once more, consider women’s stated preference for men's height. Is it really a narrowly specific (and quite rare) combination of centimeters or feet and inches you’re after? Or is it a certain way you want to feel, physically, around the guy when you’re together? Because if you’re a woman of short or average height, most men will already be taller than you (even in heels), and if you want to feel smaller or daintier or otherwise like a smol bean next your dude, then perhaps you don’t actually need, or even want, a man who is literally 6’3”. Maybe more importantly, I feel like the women who insist on very tall men are also picturing a very specific body type attached to that height that isn’t even necessarily “tall” at all.

Be honest: are you as likely to be as attracted to a tall, thinner guy as you are to a tall man with visible gym muscles and some bulk to his frame? I don’t think that height is actually so important that any woman with such a requirement would select a tall, thin man over an athletic or bulkier guy who is average height, especially if she isn’t so thin, herself. Why? Because the symbol (the specific height requirement) did not match the desire (a big dude who makes you feel small and protected) hiding behind it. Perhaps a man who is 5’9” with a stocky frame and noticeable muscles who can throw you over his shoulder without effort would actually fulfill that desire just the same, or better.

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Once we move from charts and graphs and YouTube rants and check in on how real life is going, someone’s “value” on the “sexual marketplace”1 feels less like a linear number and more like a unique 3D shape made up of personality, values, and physical traits. You don’t go from “PhD holder” down to “middle class HVAC repairman who reads Sartre on his lunch breaks.” The first is only a status marker, while the second are qualities that make up the person. Someone who both has those qualities and also a PhD are statistically rare, so you need to recalibrate in order to get what you want.

Recalibrating one’s standards isn’t just about figuring out what we want from a potential mate, though; it’s also about understanding who we are to everyone else.

Avoiding falling into adolescent habits of attraction

The tendency of people to chase after potential mates who will probably never reciprocate their feelings is how we dated (or, subsequently, didn’t) as teenagers. I spent a good chunk of the latter part of middle school plus most of high school obsessed with a certain Type of Guy, just like everyone else in my cohort of teenage girls: handsome, blonde, popular jocks2. The kind that resembled the most common of handsome teenage movie stars. I picked one to obsess over in particular, the crush was never reciprocated, and he was actually kind of mean about it in the early days because I acted like an obsessive weirdo to him.

Anyway, the point is, don’t do this anymore. Ask yourself: do you know what you’re looking for, and why? Do you have any evidence that these people would ever be into you? How many repeated rejections by the same Type of Person will you endure before you allow yourself to look elsewhere?

Plenty of people have discussed the current problem of women’s standards being too high and, to a lesser extent, men’s as well. One way in which this can manifest in women is that she wants the Tall Handsome Finance Guy archetype while she, herself is the embodiment of the Cookie Monster PJ Pants with Tangled Plastic Amazon Hair Extensions and a Groupon Spray Tan archetype. You can see the male version of this play out with the kinds of men who call objectively hot celebrities “mid” or fat between WoW sessions while having questionable hygiene habits and a hundred extra pounds around their waists.

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What’s your (arche)type?

I’ve discussed this before, but one thing that’s both important and so often overlooked is not just figuring out who your type is, but figuring out whose type you are. Who do you tend to attract? Who falls all over you when you walk into a room, who tends to give you the most sincere compliments, who shows the most immediate interest? More importantly, are those the same people who you tend to become attracted to, yourself? If not, how’s that been going for you?

I think it's been long enough now that I can say with some irony that I was somewhat lucky in how I was brutally rejected so often early on because I learned a lot about who fit into which Boy-Box and why. Being almost certainly not-autistic while also obsessed to an autistic degree with categorizing things and people probably helped. I think about this post a lot when I think about “types” because it seems to validate my experiences so well. says:

She understands her attractiveness isn't universal, but to a certain type-of-guy she's his 10.

You need to be looking for that certain type-of-guy, or certain type-of-girl, find out where they hang out, and go reassess your options. There are people of all hotness and financial and educational and personality categories contained within those groups of certain types-of-people you are most likely to attract. This is not lowering expectations, but calibrating them properly.

When I was about 12 and in my hideously gawky and accidentally-androgynous phase, I was hanging out with some neighbor friends whose similarly-aged male cousins were visiting, and one of the boys became almost comically obsessed with me for the two or three hours we were there. He told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, which was such an unusual thing to hear back then that I thought he was joking. I never saw him again after that and I don’t even remember his name, but his words and unprecedented doe-eyed attention stuck with me.

As it turns out, I’m that guy’s type. I just had to figure out the essence of that guy, what qualities that guy had that made him notice certain things about me that he liked, and see who else was like that. And I learned these things because that guy was rare enough back then that I could pattern-match until it became easy enough to predict who, at the very least, wasn’t that guy. Of course, I’ve been wrong before and I’ve both overplayed and underplayed my hand, but most of the time, I’ve been pretty correct about who will and will not be into me.

For example, I am not these guys’ type:

Extremely Handsome Sports Guy: This guy will literally never even know I exist unless forcibly introduced to me by someone else. I am completely invisible to this guy. If someone made us to go on a date together, we would bore each other senseless. I am not outwardly feminine enough for him, I am simply too much of an earnest nerd relative to his carefully laid-back, cool persona, and I am unable to pretend to have fun at professional sporting events, which he is required to attend regularly with a female accessory.

These guys come in different flavors, but mostly they are usually the exact 6’3” guys who end up in finance later simply because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves or their family’s money or the MBA they got because they didn’t have any other discernable interests.

Gym Bro: This is a sub-type of Extremely Handsome Sports Guy in that he is stereotypically attractive (albeit in a different way), single-minded, and typically goes for women who wear dresses and want babies or who, at the very least, wear coordinated, sexy outfits to the gym and not whatever pajamas she woke up in that day. I am, again, completely invisible to this Type of Guy.

I add this category mostly because I have literally never in my entire life been hit on at the gym. Any gym, in any state, during any year, since I started going to them in 2002.

Ever.

Very Serious Academic: I annoy the shit out of these men. I am not serious enough, I occasionally engage in pop culture and know who Morgan Wallen is, I am a bit too over the top emotionally for them and I am probably not ambitious enough. This Type of Guy reliably accidentally falls for me, anyway, because he will mistake me for One of Them at a party after I impress him by knowing what the Large Hadron Collider is or something, which is more than he can say for everyone else he’s spoken to tonight, at this party his roommate dragged him to that I’ll never be able to get him to go to again, the whole evening setting miserably unrealistic expectations for both of us as we mutually trick ourselves into a relationship.

These could also be Very Serious Artists. The point is that they are Very Serious, and I am not. They are big snobs, and I cannot maintain serious snobbery for long without arguing myself out of it. They are disciplined, and I am impulsive and impatient. I am also not dumb, so they tend to like me if they meet me under the right circumstances where my other Very Annoying Qualities are not on display, but they inevitably become exasperated with me, as though I am their annoying little sister who they have unfortunately grown too fond of to leave but must still criticize at every opportunity in the name of trying to help me Be Better.

Middle-Manager Griller: Similar in basicness to Extremely Handsome Sports Guy, but not born rich, so his pickiness level is more pragmatic in that he likes traditional femininity and expects some kids, but doesn’t expect as much in the way of accoutrements from a woman. He maybe noticed me once or twice but writes me off as being too much of an over-educated3 cat lady libtard to deal with interpersonally beyond perhaps a good-natured chat at events we both attend. We have nothing in common and both politely understand this and we’re not mad about it. We wish each other the best.

This is basically the country version of the rich finance guy. He might even be country-rich, meaning his wealth is self-made from quietly owning a successful farm supply store that he inherited from his dad, or operating his own small plumbing company that he started in his parents’ garage at seventeen, but he’s humble about it. Most likely Type of Guy to actually rescue the Dunkin barista because he’s the only type to actually appreciate the kind of simple femininity that just wants to be taken care of even when she’s bratty and doesn’t know why.

Anyway, I have learned not to go after those men (well, usually; there are exceptions to every rule). After all that rejection, I wanted to stop being attracted to guys who would never reciprocate my feelings, so I just eventually started writing them off as “not an option” for so long that it worked. That, to me, doesn’t feel like “lowering” my standards, either; it feels pragmatic, and in fact it was almost magical how well it worked.

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There will always be exceptions, like I said, and maybe you actually want to go after one of these guys whose type you have determined you are decidedly not — yet, anyway. What then?

The exceptions

Chris — the man I chased desperately with varying success for three years — most closely resembled Extremely Handsome Sports Guy in attitude, appearance, and behavior. If it weren't for his curiosity and intelligence (and probably glasses) signaling to me that he was not fully That Guy but just played one at parties, I might not have even tried opening myself up to that kind of potential rejection.

So, what worked?

It was easy: all I had to do was completely reinvent my entire personality to suit his.

I'm mostly joking, but what I mean is that I actually had to try harder. I had to actually look at myself, my behaviors, my affectations, and everything about me that had gone uninvestigated for the simple fact that it hadn’t yet needed investigating. It wasn't so easy when I wasn't selecting from the pool of guys who I knew would likely respond well to me naturally, who either didn’t mind or easily tolerated the behaviors that repelled Guys Like Chris. What did that mean for me and Chris?

Chris had a thing about “games.” He said he hated them, never wanted to play them, was turned off by them, etc. I brushed this off as paranoia on his part because I didn’t think I played any games. I was pretty transparent about everything — who I was, what I believed in, how I felt about him and our relationship, or my hopes for one. But it turned out there were “games” I played that I didn’t see as games at the time — just little things I’d overlooked in my relationships with other men in the past either because we were both young and playing the same games and thought it was normal, or because the guys in the past would — did, apparently — simply let it slide when I’d engage in them rather than confront me about it, allowing me to bask in blissful ignorance thinking I lacked any real problematic or manipulative behavior4.

It also meant that I had to turn it down a notch. This wasn’t the Type of Guy who would get excited about how much I liked him — he was the type to get scared of such heavy-handed affection being thrown his way too early. To him, such a thing seemed almost careless rather than romantic or flattering. So, after the first time I displayed some overzealous and contextually irrational jealousy, leading to freaking him out and him calling a break, I quickly recalibrated and ensured that if I were to feel that way again, I would deescalate my own emotions using methods I already knew worked rather than getting brandy-drunk at his family’s cabin and whining about some other girl he had been with before.

Anyway, Daniel, who I was with between the ages of 19 - 215, was also a Type of Guy who wouldn’t (shouldn’t) otherwise be into me: the Very Serious Academic/Artist. He had initially written me off, too, for the same reasons I had already assumed he wouldn’t like me, but we had one of those moments that made him think there was more compatibility and maturity there (I mean, I do have my moments). When we first started dating, he was literally warned about me by some of our coworkers who told him I was too young for him and too much of a “party girl” and that we wouldn’t be compatible. As it turns out, they were mostly right, but it took two nearly-blissful years to amicably figure that out, even if I did fuck it up the whole way.

Daniel unwittingly gave me the primer on how to behave around Chris nearly ten years later — respectfully and considerately, in ways I didn’t realize (or previously accept) really could be so deeply gendered. Frankly, it could probably all be boiled down to maturity, a quality most of us don’t yet possess in our late teens and twenties, and one that some people never manage to acquire.

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Whose standards?

It’s also worth examining how many of your filters and requirements are genuinely even yours to begin with. Perhaps they were absorbed by those of your friends and you don’t want to lose their favor; perhaps teen magazines told you that the only attractive male body type was Brad Pitt in Fight Club, so you’ve convinced yourself that’s all you can get tingly about even though you only dated the one guy who actually looked like that and you had nothing to talk about and he cheated on you with someone so wildly different from you that you had to wonder why he even bothered with you in the first place. Or perhaps you’re a white guy who’s been obsessed with petite Asian girls since one broke your heart in 2009, so you convince yourself you can never date a different Type of Girl ever again because you need her back, in some form or another. The only Type of Girl who turns your head now is the Petite Asian Girl, and you must get her, no matter how few of them are interested in you. Why isn’t this working? You ask. Am I destined to be single forever?

The latter Type of Guy is one I’ve known a lot of, for some reason or another, since all the way back in high school even if Petite Asian Girl actually manifested as BPD Art Ho or Manic Pixie Dream Girl or Unattainable Statuesque Redheaded Model or Poly Girl Who’s Also Dating Your Friend, or whatever (god there are so many more Types I want to call out here), and the happy ones finally got over their long-ago ex or unreciprocated crush and found and married women who share their values and interests and general background and who are pretty and sweet, finally deviating from what they thought was their “type” and realizing that there was a whole world out there full of women who were more than interested in them and what they had to offer once they took the blinders off. Would you call that “settling”? How about “lowering” his standards? In my mind, knowing those guys, I don’t look at any of their girlfriends or wives and think they lowered anything; I see them as finally having made sense of what they wanted from a woman and removing the symbols of those things from their requirements and refocusing on those desires on their own.

Ultimately, you don’t need to lower your standards; you just need to calibrate them with reality in mind. Not the reality that you don’t deserve “more” or whatever, but the reality that your symbols and filters may not match your actual desires, or theirs. What can you recalibrate without feeling like you’re “settling”? I bet you can find something.

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But what J. Allen says in the last half of his note here is true (and ironically negates the point he opens with):

All those Alpha Chad matches that are making her so delusional aren't wifing her up. Like Stella at The Human Carbohydrate says rather succinctly in her excellent piece On The Desperation of Female Neediness:

You wanted to fuck me, I wanted you to love me.

Being wifed up is probably, statistically, what she's after, not the casual sex on its own. Come on, guys, we know this. So what's she actually succeeding at, exactly?

(Here’s the YouTube video with the stats from the above images and the article where I found it.)

It's been long established that men are much more likely to say yes to spontaneous sex with a stranger than women are. This study has been replicated time and again and that phenomenon factors in here when we consider just how little this “success" actually matters for women in general. Women may do the casual sex, but they do it with the hope that it'll turn into more. Men enthusiastically do the causal sex with little care if it goes further — with many not wanting it to go further at all.

Women may get more sex than men do on these apps, but it's not what they want. The only people who really get what they want are the top percentage of men who are using the apps for casual sex and the much smaller percentage of women who want the same thing.

Women's relative “success" on dating apps is based on men's metrics.

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J. is responding to Rohan's comment on a recent essay in which says that dating apps are still, effectively, built for (and by) men:

Dating apps aggressively reflect male preferences, sexuality neutral. They’re long on photos, short on text. They filter primarily on location, which has some usefulness, but is most useful if the question is “who’s geographically close enough to me that walking to my place for sex is a realistic option” .

makes a good point that, while that may be the case, women actually make up most of the leadership and decision making for these apps and that the user interfaces and engagement prompts are designed with women in mind. Like Rohan says, “are we under the impression that men talk about the “Sunday scaries?”

But while some parts of the UI are built with men clearly in mind (see Eurydice's list above), and while it's been established that women need more than photos to determine whether they actually like someone enough to fuck them or even genuinely find them attractive, it's obvious that the feminization of the rest of the user experience is to keep women using them since they're not at all designed with women's natural attraction habits and patterns in mind and wouldn't otherwise attract enough of them to make them usable for heterosexual people. There's a reason women get into clubs for free and why “ladies’ nights” exist, isn't there? As I've talked about with my own experiences, many women often just get frustrated and overwhelmed with the inorganic marketplace experience and often just stop using them, or aren't doing so enthusiastically. Since most women aren't satisfied with a series of eternal one night stands, getting them to use the apps that are built exactly for that — that men use in such a way, even when the app is specifically designed for long-term relationships, like Hinge — is going to require some incentives, even if that means stupid little questions in baby language about being scared on Sundays and integrating astrology into the experience.

Interestingly, groups that have the highest success rate in terms of users wanting the same things and finding actual success in their goals are the ones with niche or kinky interests.2

One more time for effect:

Apps rarely benefit anyone but the small percentage of successful men and the small percentage of women who only want causal sex (and some marginal groups for whom it's actually easier to find people like them online).

Everyone else needs to go the fuck outside.

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Speaking of using terms lazily and colloquially when specificity and nuance would be more helpful, most people also use broad, inaccurate terminology to describe feminism and feminists — and don’t get me started on political labels for anything left of center. They are not all “liberals” and a good chunk of the left deeply loathe actual liberals. They are also not all leftists — liberals fucking hate leftists almost as much as leftists hate leftists.

Anyway, back to feminism.

Aside from the usual “wave” delineations, there are also different subtypes of feminists who prioritize different aspects of the ideology. I’ve compiled a list of the more visible feminist archetypes that have an online presence and their primary traits and beliefs:

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Liberal Feminist

Proud "girlboss"; focuses advocacy and activism on policy — politically safe-enough issues like abortion, the wage gap, getting women involved in STEM and other male-dominated fields; patron saint is Ruth Bader Ginsberg; enjoys watching women act like stereotypical men in movies; will vote for any Democratic woman for president because it’s her turn; sex-positive; loves symbolic gestures like pussy hats2 and online petitions; "believe all women."

Intersectional feminist

More likely to identify as nonbinary than female; MeToo’d her ex-boyfriend for watching lesbian porn; fights for racial justice and queer visibility and avoids anything directly related to women’s rights because she wants to stop “centering cishet white women”; BDSM practitioner by default; probably a communist; “Black trans women started Pride”; polyamorous and calls herself queer but only has sex with other women when one of her boyfriends is involved.

Egalitarian Feminist

Intuitively calls herself a feminist because she’s a woman and interested in her own rights and fairness in general, but easily feels empathy for male causes because what she’s after is legal equality and mutual respect, not supremacy; "I see your point, but what about..."; tries to convince men of their shared victimhood under patriarchy and is confused when they don’t respond well to her approach; disowned by radfems; fine with trans people but doesn't want to be called a "uterus-owner" or pretend abortion is "actually a queer issue"; most likely to become an evopsych-adjacent, anti-idpol, NLOG3 auntie once she hits her 30s.4

Radfem

Most concerned with sex-based, biological oppression; most closely identifies with the 2nd-wavers from the 60s and 70s; necessarily TERF; believes no progress has been made since women won the right to vote in 1920; all porn is rape and causes rape; literally hates men and is really loud about it all the time; sometimes a political lesbian, or single, and if she’s dating a man, she’s very quiet about it lest she be accused of Not My Nigel-ing; Andrea Dworkin is her patron saint; doesn’t believe in gender and wants artificial wombs because Mother Nature is actually an oppressor, too (gender traitor); probably considers herself a Marxist; obsessed with rape, especially rape that is perpetuated by men pretending to be trans women in order to assault women in public bathrooms.

Conservative Feminist

Cares most about preserving and promoting the institution of marriage and the nuclear family unit; radicalized by trans girls in girls' youth sports and girls’ bathrooms; doesn’t tend to have anything in common with literally any other type of feminist except the explicitly Christian ones and Radfems on only this one very specific issue; only identifies as a feminist when she thinks it gives her credibility on Leftist Twitter or a suburban PTA meeting; TERF/SWERF by default.

Christian Feminist

Basically a Conservative Feminist but with abortion as her primary motivator instead of trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams in high school (although she opposes that, too); cares most about abortion and uses her conditional concern for women who have them to claim a feminist title for political clout; “don’t degrade yourself by having premarital sex!”; only Conservative Feminists consider her to be a real feminist.

Hippie Feminist

Nature is her entire personality; probably Wiccan or pagan; chronically naked at inappropriate times; talks about women's superior spiritual abilities and connection to God or the universe or some vague goddess; only eats organic food and makes her own soap from the backyard goats; always in a long, flowing dress; has been under the influence of marijuana or mushrooms since 1998; anti-vax; festy girl-to-tradwife pipeline.

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Honorable mentions:

Covert Feminist:

Conservative woman who associates feminism with liberal politics and so insists she isn’t one but has all the entitlement of which liberal feminists are often accused, primarily regarding expecting men to perform traditional masculine roles that regular feminists eschew and then dismissing the idea of following traditional feminine roles, herself; is actually Tomi Lahren.

Not-A-Feminist Feminist:

Liberal or moderate woman who, mirroring the Covert Feminist, believes everything that liberal feminists believe but who won’t call herself a feminist because she knows it’s a controversial term and doesn’t want to argue or make people dislike her.

*This list is for entertainment purposes only. Any criticism of my tongue-in-cheek summaries will be met with firm instructions to chill the fuck out because it’s just a joke, man.