Madison Metricula

Some think that being poor is simple. You don’t have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, so you’re forced to buy less stuff. But that’s not really how it works. When you’re broke, you can’t do all the little things that will improve your budget over the long run. It actually costs more to be poor.

When you’re poor, you can’t buy your food in bulk, buy high quality stuff that will last, or own your own tech instead of renting. It costs money up front to save money over the long run. Worse yet, being poor often comes with hidden, intangible costs that make digging yourself out of poverty even harder.

Food Can Be Cheap, But Eating Healthy Is Expensive

As any college student can tell you, getting food when you’re poor isn’t that hard. Ramen is under twenty cents a pack. The problem is getting healthy food. Ramen consists of 20% empty calories and 80% salt. If you only ate that for every meal for years, your long term health would be at serious risk (or so my doctor tells me).

This was the exact situation I found myself in when I was broke. Time was more valuable than my health, and fast food was easier than cooking at home. It wasn’t much more expensive, either. This lead to an unhealthy hierarchy of meals: on a good week, I could buy hot dogs from my local QuikTrip for $2. On a bad week, it was Ramen for days. Two liter bottles of store-brand soda cost less than orange juice or milk, so if I wanted something to drink besides water, that was what I got.

Now, a few years of that diet is already going to be pretty bad. The long-term consequences were worse. Even when I started earning more, the habits stuck. Soda is still a staple of my diet. It’s taken a long time to build the habit of making proper, home-cooked meals. It’s easy to think that you’ll just change your habits once you get more money, but you don’t realize just how many bad habits you build.

This is a difficult trap to escape. According to research from the Harvard School of Public Health, healthy meals cost an average of $1.50 more per day (or ~$45 per month) than unhealthy meals. When you have money, that’s not a huge deal. However, if you make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and you work 40 hours per week, that amounts to roughly 3.6% of your yearly salary. If you can only get the part time hours of 32 hours per week (which is more common for minimum wage jobs), it’s 4.5% of your yearly take home. Before taxes, by the way.

When $1.50 a day can account for nearly 5% of your yearly salary, it’s no surprise you choose the $1 soda over the $4 orange juice. Who the hell cares about “long-term health consequences” when you can barely pay rent? You know what has some serious “long-term health consequences”? Getting evicted. I’ll pay rent today and worry about heart disease later.

When you’re poor, you can’t afford to think about the “long run.” I knew that it was smart to buy some stuff from big membership stores, but I couldn’t even get past the membership fees. I knew that eating gas station hot dogs and ramen was going to kill me some day, but as long as that day wasn’t before rent was due, I had to live with it. I probably could’ve done marginally better if I planned to cook more meals ahead of time but I, like 6.8 million Americans according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had to work multiple jobs to get by. I didn’t have enough time to be healthy, and I didn’t have enough money to save money.

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Cheap Cars Cost More to Repair, and Public Transportation Is a Time Suck

Having a job doesn’t mean much if you can’t get to your job. Owning a car is expensive even after you’ve paid off the initial cost. Public transit may be more accommodating to lower income tiers, but it isn’t always available in every city.

Transportation has two major hidden costs when you’re poor. First, lots of expensive car repairs are avoidable...if you have money to fix them early on. I used to ignore changing my brake pads for months. My car would start making that familiar squealing noise that indicated I didn’t have much time left before the brake pads were gone. I hated the noise, but I hated overdrafting on my account more. So, I turned the stereo up a little louder and tried to drive less.

Replacing brake pads can cost an average of $145, depending on your car. If I had to spend $145 to change my brake pads (assuming I even had that much in my account), at best I’d wipe out my food budget for the month. At worst, I wouldn’t have enough to pay utilities. So I’d put it off.

On at least one occasion, my brakes got so bad they were grinding down the rotors. In case you’ve never had this happen, grinding rotors makes a terrible, metal-on-metal sound. Replacing a rotor also costs hundreds more than replacing brake pads. Sure, I successfully put off one expense, but when the rotors broke, I was screwed. The longer I waited on basic maintenance, the more expensive the repairs got.

Waiting was often my only option, though. Unlike buying healthy food, there were times I literally didn’t have the money. Not “I have this money, but I shouldn’t spend it.” More like, the car repair is $145 and I have $12 in my account. And I still have to drive my car to work. There’s no third option.

Public transit is a great option, but a lot of cities don’t provide it. If yours does, things still aren’t great. With public transit, you face a very different cost: time. What would be a fifteen minute drive becomes an hour long bus ride. Miss a bus and you’ve lost another 10-15 minutes. When you only have a couple free hours in the day, that hour on the bus might mean you can’t prepare a decent meal or do laundry. This can apply to cars too (“I’ll just do that hour-long oil change next week”), but with public transportation, the cost of time really adds up fast.

Unfortunately, transportation isn’t exactly optional. If your car breaks down and you don’t have money to fix it, you lose out on more wages. Some even lose their jobs. The time costs of public transit can also make it harder to fit in things that help dig yourself out of poverty, like education. Ironically, just getting to work can make it harder to work, if you can’t afford all the associated costs that go with it.

http://lifehacker.com/5868374/the-ca...

You Need to Dress Nicely to Move Up, But New Clothes Aren’t a Priority

Despite their necessity, buying new clothes is often seen as one of the most stereotypically frivolous purchases. Why should poor people be shopping for new or nice clothing when they’re struggling to make ends meet, right? The problem is, if you don’t spend money on clothes, you pay a hefty social cost.

Several years ago, I worked for Walmart. As is the case for most retail employees, I had to buy my own uniform. At the time, we were required to wear dark blue shirts and khaki pants. Since I owned exactly none of either, I had to blow through any clothing budget I had just to be ready for work (before I got my first paycheck, no less). The problem was, I worked outside as a cart-pusher. Navy blue shirts tend to fade in the harsh Georgia sunlight. Plus, my shoes wore through every three months from walking on pavement all day. And not just “they look ratty”—my toes were literally touching burning pavement a few months after getting new shoes.

Needless to say, I looked like crap most of the time. My shirts were faded and my shoes were falling apart, and that was while I was on the clock. The rest of my wardrobe looked even worse. Any money I could spare for clothing usually had to go towards new uniforms. The problem is, if I wanted to get a job somewhere else, the nicest thing I had to wear was my work outfit. It took a long time before I could afford to update my closet with anything even remotely presentable while still keeping up with uniform churn. In the end, I only pulled it off by opening a small line of credit with a clothing retailer. No matter how many people advised against borrowing money when you’re broke, I simply couldn’t afford the clothing I needed to look presentable to an employer before getting the job I was applying for.

Dressing well is an awkward catch-22. If you’re poor and you have a nice wardrobe, people think you’re irresponsible with money. However, if you dress poorly, you’re more likely to be judged poorly, especially in job interviews. How you dress can be the difference between landing the job and being ruled out as soon as you walk in the door. This type of effect is so strong, that even wearing a recognizable brand name can improve how others perceive you. It’s sad, but it’s the world we live in.

Of course, the costs of clothing don’t end at social pressures. Merely keeping your clothes clean and presentable can cost time and money, too. If you don’t own or have access to a washer and dryer, you need to spend time at a laundromat. Not only does this cost money every single time you clean your clothes, but it takes precious time that could be better spent working, learning a skill, or taking care of your family.

The worst part is how frivolous this all sounds. Frankly, it’s demoralizing. As someone who’s had to wear crap clothes to work and even crappier clothes on my off days, I know how it feels to be seen differently. You get comments about how you need new clothes. You’re reminded, politely and unhelpfully, how your clothes are faded. It’s vaguely implied that your failure to buy new shoes isn’t a symptom of your low paycheck, but laziness. Why haven’t you gone to the store to buy new shoes yet? As if going to the store was the biggest hurdle.

Yet it still feels like caring about how you look is vanity, rather than practical. Food is practical. Housing is practical. Transportation is practical. New clothes? Why are you wasting your money on new clothes, and then complaining about how broke you are? Fortunately, you can at least ignore this mindset. You can’t change people’s perceptions if you’re wearing old clothes, but you can at least ignore the people getting on your case for “wasting” money. You know, provided you can scrape enough together to find clothes to begin with.

http://lifehacker.com/5867952/dress-...

Fees For Everything Can Compound to Ruin Your Budget

Avoiding fees is a life or death survival trait for low income households. This gets its own category because when you’re poor, fees are everywhere. Fees for having a bank. Fees for not having a bank. Fees for paying late. Fees for paying with a certain type of card. Fees for not being able to pay a fee. A person can drown in the various fees that disproportionately hurt poor families.

One fee that hurt me a lot over the years were overdraft fees. If I charged something to my debit card, and then it turned out I didn’t have enough money, I was charged $35 per transaction. This seems like a no-brainer, right? Just don’t spend money you don’t have, Eric!

Except that’s not how it works when you’re broke. You have to obsessively over-analyze every single transaction in your account. Not just how much, but when. If you pay the power bill today, but it doesn’t clear until next week, then you have to remember that your account is that much emptier than it looks. My credit union in particular had terrible software. Its website looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 90’s (and still doesn’t). It had absolutely no tools to keep track of which money was allocated for different purposes. The “Available Balance” box attempted to indicate how much unspent money I really had, but it was unreliable. The best I could do was to keep a written log of every transaction personally, but if I forgot something or made a math error, I was screwed.

This was made even worse when my credit union would apply transactions in a highest-to-lowest order, rather than chronologically. Say I had $150 in my account, and accidentally spent $160. One transaction was a $150 power bill, while the rest was four transactions of $2.50 each. Even if the power bill was the last one I paid, I would sometimes find it was taken out of my account first, leaving me with zero dollars. Then, each $2.50 transaction would cost me $35 extra in overdraft fees. If they were charged in the correct order, I would only get one fee, but instead I would be charged $140 in fees. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more often than it should. Sometimes, this was my own fault, but it also occurred when deposits didn’t clear when I expected them to, or bills were charged sooner than their due date. A minor mistake for someone with more money destroyed my budget for weeks.

Banks aren’t the only ones who charge compounding fees, either. Every year, I had to pay to register my car. One particularly bad year, I didn’t have spare money to pay registration. I also worked one mile from work, so when it came time to choose between registration or food, I took a risk that I could make it to work without getting pulled over. One week after my registration was due, I got pulled over. I was let off with a warning, and told to pay my registration. Another week later (before I’d even earned enough money to pay for registration), I got pulled over again. Since this was the second time for the same offense, I got a citation for nearly $100. This wasn’t making it any easier to pay the fine. Eventually, I was finally able to pay it with money I received from relatives on Christmas. Just what I always wanted.

Fees are everywhere when you’re poor. Banks may charge a ton of fees for using basic services like checking. A simple traffic ticket can spiral out of control, sometimes even leading to being arrested, plus more fees. Utilities may charge fees if you pay by debit card. If you can’t get approval at a bank, payment schemes like pay cards can have charge you fees just to use your money. All these fees add up to huge pains that hurt a lot worse when you don’t have money. Failing to pay those fees only leads to more fees, which means that, like most areas in life, it costs more to be poor.

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With all of these things, there is an element of responsibility. For example, could I have walked to work instead of driving a car with an expired tag? Maybe! Then again, I tried that for a while, got caught in the rain, and my phone was destroyed. At the time I was trying to break into writing about Android, so that choice to save money could’ve derailed my entire career.

That’s what makes being poor so tough. Sure, you can make choices that lighten the load on yourself, but the margin of error is much thinner. Meanwhile, the amount of extra work you have to do just to break even is much higher. You could spend tens of hours each week trying to optimize every dime in your budget, just to have one mistake ruin you for a month.

This is just my experience, but many people had it way worse than I have. At my lowest points, I was fortunate enough to either have people to help out, or lucked into receiving a windfall right when I needed it. Others aren’t so lucky. When the punishment for making a mistake or having an accident is so harsh, it can make it nearly impossible for even the hardest working people to break out of the cycle of poverty.

Photos by Hajime NAKANO, Magharebia, Lara604, Paul Swansen.

When my dear friend took her daughter shopping for a homecoming dress, she knew she would have to keep the dress code regulations in mind. 

Delone Catholic High School has maintained the standards for a couple of years, so this wasn’t a problem for Jessica*. She told me she even brought along a measuring tape to make sure the hem was no more than two inches above her knees. 

Additionally, there were no cut-outs, the dress wasn’t tight, and it provided ample coverage up top, which was already something Jessica appreciated as a mother to a teenager.

I don’t have teenage daughters, but I was a teenager once. I get that sometimes you need to have some ground rules, and moms need to oversee dress choices, especially when they are paying for them. 

I definitely watch what my little girls wear, although I tell them it’s so they will be warm enough or be able to run around without showing their underwear. 

And schools have a right to issue dress codes and expect they are followed, which is why Jessica was so careful to make sure her daughter did just that.

Olivia* is a good kid — she is an honor student and a star athlete — never a discipline problem, just a really great girl who I have no doubt will change the world for the better. She picked out a great dress that her mother made sure met the standards and went to the dance with her date, looking forward to celebrating their last homecoming as high school students.

The dress code is nothing new at Delone — at last year’s prom, girls submitted photos of themselves wearing their dresses ahead of time for approval, but this year, the staff informed students and parents that it would be decided at the door. Male students did not need prior approval for their clothing choices.

Yet I still can’t believe what happened when Olivia got to the dance. While her date was told to head into the dance area, Olivia was asked to go with the rest of the girls into the cafeteria, a room which has one glass wall facing the auditorium where all of the boys waited for their dates. 

In order to be allowed in, the girls had to each pass an inspection conducted by one of the administrators. They were LINED UP ON A WALL, and one by one, each girl was subjected to a measuring tape and a visual up-and-down before they were either let in or made to stay put.

When it came to be her turn, Olivia’s hem was measured and rejected, in spite of the fact that her mom had made sure it would pass muster. Since they live so far from home, there was no time to run back and change, but even if she wanted to, the administration told her and the some 50 other girls that they would not be allowed to leave the cafeteria. They were not able to contact their dates and their parents were not called. 

Olivia broke down in tears, totally humiliated by the entire fiasco. Some of her friends managed to scrounge up some sweat pants, others were given graduation robes, and eventually, someone lent Olivia a pair of flat shoes, and when the chaperone remeasured, her dress was magically deemed acceptable.

Knowing that I was a writer, Jessica reached out to me in hopes of spreading the word about what happened at her daughter’s homecoming dance. 

As a woman, as a mother, and as a former teacher, I was absolutely horrified for Olivia and the other girls. They were inspected like cantaloupes and in a fishbowl at that, with their male classmates looking on, and made to feel cheap and dirty, as if they were less than those girls wearing longer dresses. 

Being a teenage girl means being self-conscious enough, but now these people in authority were hyper-focusing on their bodies.

It’s no wonder then, that one of the fathers who was at the dance took to Facebook to make a joke about the behaviors he witnessed, hosting a public discussion questioning the parents who let their girls “dress like that,” and even calling out the homecoming queen herself. Another mother chimed in that she doesn’t understand why parents allow their daughters to “dress like streetwalkers.” 

The original poster went on to say that it wouldn’t have been his daughters in trouble, because they “respect themselves too much” to ever dream of dressing like that.

The reason this conversation seems acceptable to these parents is because of policies like the school's: This father sees nothing wrong with publicly calling out minor girls for what they are wearing, all the while extolling the “virtue” of his own daughters, whom he states “have too much respect to dress like that.” That conversation is considered socially permissible because when you assign moral value to clothing, the girl in the dress is no longer a person, but merely an object.

I can’t stop thinking about what it must have felt like for these young women to be lined up and gawked at by their teachers to decide if they were “worthy” of entering the dance. 

Why is it that girls are supposed to surrender their bodies for this kind of treatment, to accept that this is what it means to be a girl? Do we really want to send that message? That if a girl is wearing a short dress, she’s a slut who won’t be admitted, while the boys are helpless animals who won’t be able to control themselves at the sight of some knees?

Jessica told me that the school regrets the way in which they went about enforcing the policy, but not the policy itself. They have asked for parents to form a committee for the next dance, hoping that there is a better way to enforce the dress code. 

She is worried that speaking out is going to cause trouble for Olivia, and wonders what the officials were thinking when they decided to treat her daughter and the rest of the girls like livestock.

I can’t help but think if the school had left the parenting to the actual parents, these young men and women who are on the brink of adulthood would be better served. 

And if anyone ever decides to come at one of my daughters with a measuring tape like they did to Olivia, intent on measuring her worth by the length of her skirt, God help them. 

When it comes to being a woman on the internet, there are enough frustrating roadblocks every day to make your brain liquefy and dribble out your ear all gross (more frustrating roadblocks than there are fireplaces at Rosings Park, AMIRITE). But possibly the most frustrating of all are the gnashing hordes constantly demanding that you educate them, educate them, educate them. Oh, you write about sexism on the internet? Well, before we get into all that boring nuance and subtle gender dynamics that feminist scholars have been demarcating for years, can you just back up 17,000 steps and prove to me that inequality exists?

Sorry, friend—for the record, forever, FUCK NO AND FUCK OFF.

Frank Bruni's op-ed on Monday, titled "Sexism's Puzzling Stamina," was painful in its simplicity. It's comforting to hear gender inequality stated so plainly—accepted so calmly and wholly—by someone outside of the feminist blogosphere. The fact is, our culture is still dealing with the same basic shit that was outraging kitchen-table progressives 20 years ago. We confuse comfort for freedom and then lambast women for complaining. We blame victims and apologize for predators. We dictate, to exacting standards, how women's bodies should look and move. We see nothing wrong with asking a female professional how her kids handle her frequent business trips, and whether or not she's considered staying home. We do not ask the same of men.

While racism and homophobia are treated, in mainstream discourse, like abominations (however meekly we might combat them and however aggressively they go to ground), sexism is still something of a grey area. Here's Bruni:

I keep flashing back more than two decades, to 1991. That was the year of the Tailhook incident, in which some 100 Navy and Marine aviators were accused of sexually assaulting scores of women. It was the year of Susan Faludi’s runaway best seller, “Backlash,” on the “war against American women,” as the subtitle said. It was when the issue of sexual harassment took center stage in Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.

All in all it was a festival of teachable moments, raising our consciousness into the stratosphere. So where are we, fully 22 years later?

We’re listening to Saxby Chambliss, a senator from Georgia, attribute sexual abuse in the military to the ineluctable “hormone level” of virile young men in proximity to nubile young women.

And:

Our racial bigotry has often been tied to the ignorance abetted by unfamiliarity, our homophobia to a failure to realize how many gay people we know and respect.

Well, women are in the next cubicle, across the dinner table, on the other side of the bed.

And on top of all of that—all the cumulative blows and fears, tiny and massive, that women are expected to absorb every day—you're asking me to educate you? You want ME to Google things for you? I don't even know you. I'm not your secretary and I'm not your mom and I don't have some special Powder Fresh library card that gets me into the restricted section where they hide all the truth about whether or not I deserve to talk at the board meeting.

If you're confused about how airplanes stay up, you don't fucking e-mail Richard Branson. And if you did, and you didn't hear back, you wouldn't assume that he isn't really committed to making airplanes stay up—or that airplanes aren't really in the sky. You'd assume that he's FUCKING BUSY.

Say a man worked really hard to establish a smart, nuanced blog about the nature of black holes. If you noticed someone constantly hounding that dude to prove that space exists, would you take that person seriously as a part of the discourse? Would you accuse the black-hole blogger of "stifling the conversation" if he refused to engage with every single dodo?

Say I throw a weekly dinner party and I'm trying to decide whether to buy wine or beer for my guests. And say I ask you, "Hey, do you think I should get wine or beer for the party?" and say you ignore my question entirely and respond, "Hey, do you think I should take a shit on the floor?" And say, also, that this conversation plays out exactly like this every single week? And then you do take a shit on the floor? And I have to clean it up?

Would you REALLY be surprised if I stopped wanting to engage with you? Would you be mad if I didn't answer your stupid question about the shitty floor?

Now imagine there are fucking thousands of you. That's what being a woman on the internet is like.

It's not black people's responsibility to be your personal racism tutor, and it's not women's responsibility to take your moist little hand and give you a guided tour through the oppressive, old-timey limitations that circumscribe our lives. It is not my responsibility to vet every single one of your stupid rape jokes, and it is not Anita Sarkeesian's responsibility to prove to you that gaming culture has a misogyny problem while she's busy processing a bajillion "make me a sandwich, cunt"s from little baby gamer boys. We've been running backup for you long enough. Fucking do your own shit.

Maybe I shouldn't be so hostile. If you've been on the receiving end of a "hush, the grown-ups are talking" or a crying cat gif, and that was painful for you, my bad. After all you're just asking, and wasn't I just saying that I'm committed to discourse and critical thinking? Yes. I am. But here's the thing: you're not. This isn't a new derailing tactic—it's ancient. One million people have written about it before me. But if my Twitter feed is any indication, plenty of people haven't read up on their own bad behavior (weird) and need a goddamn refresher. So here's the late, great Derailing for Dummies on the subject. (Sometimes I just read Derailing for Dummies over and over again instead of therapy.)

By insisting you can only learn if they right then and there sacrifice further hours of time going over the same ground they have so often in the past, you may also make them give up and go away altogether, enabling you to win by default.

But further, you give the impression that you really want to learn, but they’re holding you back! That’s right, using this tactic you can suggest that full understanding is what you crave – you want to be a better, more connected and compassionate person – but it’s not your fault! Nobody ever gave you the education! And now that someone is here who is so obviously qualified, they’re denying you your Privilege® given right to have everything you want handed to you on a platter!

Look. It's not that hard. You don't have to be perfect. Just be grateful for what you have and take a second and listen. Instead of trying to pretend you've never had anything (for a primer on how you can have nothing but still have a whole lot, watch this), just take a second and listen to other people. Be grateful, pay attention, and then react. You don't even have to be proactive if you don't want to. But don't ask me to do your homework for you, because that shit is insulting.

Speaking for myself—the only person I can reasonably speak for—being a Man never seemed like an attainable goal, let alone a desirable one. This has something to do with me and who I am, certainly; but it also has a great deal to do with what we think a Man is in this culture [1].

Man, from my perspective, is not an identity so much as a Long Con, and masculinity is a concatenation of anxiety–founded posturings [2].

I want to make it clear that I believe we can transcend narrow ideas of gender, wherever they come to us from. Masculinity, or at least unexamined masculinity, may be an anxiety disorder, but it is one that—in my experience—loses much of its power simply by being recognized as such.

In a 2011 article, sexuality educator Charlie Glickman describes workshops on male gender socialization in which he asks participants who have spent at least some time in the US to brainstorm words that describe “real men.” He reports that “regardless of the age, gender mix, sexual orientation, or racial makeup of the group,” the responses consistently come up with words like: strong, muscular, heterosexual, dominant, cop, firefighter, mechanic, lawyer, business man, CEO, leader, or violent; and phrases such as: watches and plays sports; doesn’t show emotions other than anger or excitement; has a big penis; gets hard when he wants; stays hard; etc. Then he asks for a list of terms used for men who don’t exhibit all of those characteristics, and the responses are consistent there as well: gay, fag, girl, weak, sissy, punk, bitch, pussy, loser, wimp. Notice that he asks what terms are used for men who don’t exhibit every characteristic of a “real man”[3].

On some level, then, all men are aware that there is an ideal of masculinity, that it is impossible to live up to, and that when we fail to live up to it we are subject to name–calling as a matter of course. We are vulnerable to criticism from gender–policing people of all genders for failing to attain or maintain this ideal.

Our marginally more enlightened age has introduced new criteria for Manhood which stands in direct contrast to the old criteria, which is itself at times self–contradictory. A Man needs no one; a Man takes care of those around him. A Man is gentle; a Man is violent. A Man is good with his hands; a Man is too powerful and important to work with his hands himself. Boys don’t cry. Except maybe they do? And if they do, when? How much? In what way is it acceptable for a man to cry? Vague permission to express emotions can provoke even more anxiety.

Glickman refers to this restrictive, ouroboros–like ideal of masculinity as the “Act Like a Man Box”; others refer to it as the “Man Box.” For our purposes I’m just going to refer to it as the Box. Living outside the Box, even thinking outside the Box, is for fags, sissies, losers, and wimps [4]. Since most people still think of gender as a binary, male or female, yes or no, this or that proposition, if you are not making every effort to be a man then you are choosing to be a woman by default. Since we live in a homophobic society, if you give up on performing to the heterosexual male ideal, then you are choosing to be homosexual by default. The Box is restrictive, but it can also seem like the only safe place for someone whose self–conception is of himself as a cisgender, heterosexual male.

As a thin, bespectacled, hay fever–ridden boy who was shy and athletically inept, I kept wandering out of the Box. I couldn’t help but notice, because I was told so repeatedly. Anxiety is often brought on by trauma, and the trauma that men share is that of gender policing [5].

Men often minimize their gender policing by calling it “teasing,” “ribbing,” or “ball–busting,” but it usually manifests as ridicule meant to point out behaviors which are not coded as masculine in an effort to correct them. This may be done with or without malice; parents, for example, may feel that by discouraging feminine–coded behaviors, they are protecting their sons from future ridicule by firmly correcting them early. Yet the cumulative effect of this is to circumscribe a section of acceptable behavior, such that by the time the average man reaches adulthood, he has internalized an extensive checklist of behaviors that must be avoided lest ridicule result. In essence, male children are subject to trauma in an effort to spare them from trauma.

From my own personal experience, here is a list of behaviors that I have been “corrected” on by relatives, teachers, or peers:

• Hair length
• Hair style
• Products used in hair care or styling
• The wearing of certain types of clothing and accessories, including shorts, sandals, v–neck shirts, and jewelry
• The color of the clothes I wear, especially bright colors
• Any use of the color pink
• Standing, sitting, or reclining in positions the commenter considered feminine
• Allowing my wrist to go limp
• Skipping
• Singing
• Dancing
• Giggling
• Being concerned about cleanliness
• Eating in too fastidious a manner
• Failing to catch a ball
• Failing to throw a ball far enough
• Falling down
• Feeling ill
• Feeing tired
• Showing compassion for others
• Holding a baby
• Playing with a child
• Reading a book
• Crying
• Laughing
• Betraying concern about my appearance
• Cleaning
• Cooking
• Sewing
• Refusing food
• Refusing alcohol
• Taking offense at verbal abuse
• Expressing pain or discomfort
• Conversing with girls
• Choosing to hang out with girls

Note that this is a list I came up with off the top of my head, in the space of about twenty minutes; anyone reading this could write a list like this. From birth most of us are given very clear ideas of how we are supposed to act. What these haphazard lists of interdictions delineate are spheres of gendered behavior that rarely, if ever, intersect, and which restrict all of us from the full range of human experience.

I couldn’t say when, precisely, this policing began to impinge upon the formation of my identity—when it was that I began constructing my own Box—but certainly by the age of 11 I was making choices based upon this feedback. One of the first things I did, because I saw no alternative, was to abdicate any expectation of competence at sports, and with it any enjoyment of them. I was not strong, fast, or agile; I was probably not as weak, slow, or uncoordinated as I believed I was either, but any kind of physical game was so fraught with the potential for humiliation and emasculation that it was safer for my psyche to simply leave sports out of my Box.

To leave out something so key to American masculinity as physical skill and achievement leaves one vulnerable. It has to be replaced with something else, another set of metrics for masculinity. I would love to be able to say that I rejected the Box entirely, but I was not strong or smart enough to do so; it was simply not a tenable choice for me at that time. Instead, I built a variation on the Box, something that for our purposes I’ll refer to as the Nerd Box [6][7].

What goes in the Nerd Box can vary. Mine contained things like (school–related) intelligence and good grades, comic books, science fiction and fantasy novels, and tabletop role–playing games. Other Nerd Boxes could include things like video games, anime, sports trivia (as opposed to sports participation), etc. There is significant overlap between the Nerd Box and what we largely refer to as fandom, but whereas fandom generally signifies enthusiasm for a particular genre or property, the Nerd Box tends to signify something additional: authority. For example, self–identified male comics nerds tend to consider themselves experts on whatever sector of comics they gravitate towards. The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy character is, after all, based in reality. Men who live in the Nerd Box may think of this authority as a way of defending their chosen domain, of being able to prove their masculinity when challenged, but it is also used to challenge others, and in practice it tends to exclude those who have only a casual or preliminary interest in the topic in question [8].

Every Nerd Box, no matter the diversity of its other contents, has one item in common: the illusion of freedom. Inside that box, and inside nerd contexts and communities, the box–dweller feels free to express opinions, to participate in discussions, to explore his enthusiasms to their fullest extent. I felt safe with other male Nerds, and as a result I formed certain misguided ideas about nerd communities: that nerds were smarter, better, more tolerant, more compassionate. Relative to the non–Nerd contexts I still had to navigate, this was somewhat true; my enthusiasms were seen as weird, childish, or trivial, all labels that were ultimately challenges to my masculinity. As a result, because I had been conditioned to see my masculinity as something fragile that must be protected, the Nerd Box became more than a container for my collection of personal signifiers of masculinity—it became a sanctuary or refuge from the police forces of mainstream masculinity.

I believe that this is a nearly universal experience for Nerd–Box–dwellers. They may use their Box as a Fortress of Solitude, connect it with other Nerd Boxes in a sort of Nerd Habitrail, or treat it as a bunker from which to lob rhetorical disdain at mainstream masculinity. Ultimately, though, the Box is, as with every other Man Box, under siege from other anxious men and from the binary–policing society at large. This need for constant vigilance is stressful, and masculinity is a stress–related anxiety disorder.

It’s this anxiety that is responsible, for example, for the bizarre online witch–hunt that is the Fake Geek Girl controversy, which has spun out and escalated into the larger and more troubling GamerGate controversy. The nerd, having asserted a claim over some sector of fandom or other expertise, reaches an uneasy equilibrium with respect to his male dominance over that topic. When a woman expresses enthusiasm for this topic, the nerd may feel that this dominance is being threatened.

We have to acknowledge that many self–described nerds tend to be socially and romantically inept; this is less true of recent generations, but it is still a factor. They tend to have fraught romantic histories filled with rejection, false starts, and insecurities related to fears of masculine inadequacy. Many of these men have a tendency to approach women, at least those whom they consider potential romantic partners, with a cocktail of charged and conflicting feelings that essentially constitute emotional PTSD. If these women are conventionally attractive, the nerd may consider them to be out of his league and associate them with women who may have rejected or even humiliated them in the past.

There can also be a problem of status. The male nerd recognizes, on some level, that constructing his own version of masculinity is not just a lateral move. In the hierarchy of maleness, he ranks below men who are Strong, Muscular, Dominant, etc.; in other words, men who more closely approach the universal Ideal Man. The male nerd also recognizes that there is a hierarchy of femininity, a (largely male–constructed) female ideal. When a self–proclaimed female nerd appears to more closely match this ideal than the male nerd does the male ideal, the male nerd may see the disparity in their divergences from the ideal as a potential threat. His discomfort may be conscious or unconscious, but it often results in a feeling of inadequacy and resentment. His response may be to pre–emptively reject these women in order to forestall any chance of feeling hurt or vulnerable as a result of their own attraction.

This is further complicated by the Box. In male–to–male non–sexual interactions, the way nerds tend to engage on shared interests is by challenging one another. These challenges may be casual, but under scrutiny the dominance play becomes obvious. Questions run along the lines of “Have you seen?” “Have you read?” “Did you know?” Each party is establishing the parameters of the other’s knowledge and authority on the topic in question. At some point one of three outcomes takes place: 1) the two accept each other as more or less equals; 2) one establishes dominance but accepts the other as a sort of informal acolyte; or 3) one is humiliated and is forced to disengage. The level of anxiety can be high, but the process is ritualized and familiar and, except in the case of the third outcome, not particularly fraught. This is because both men see themselves as contending within a sphere that they have mutually though independently designated as male, and in their way the rules of approach are as well–worn as those of any lower primate. Mainstream males interact in very similar ways; it is simply the common ground interests that differ.

However, when a man and a woman interact in the same spheres, the results can be much more confused and unpleasant. The woman has called into question the masculinity of the man’s interests simply by showing an interest in it. The gender binary is composed largely of arbitrary oppositions and exclusions; the extreme logical extension of this is that men and women should never share interests. Aside from being a terrible guideline for partnerships, this makes any approach into a perceived male space by a woman yet another threat to the masculinity of the man or men in question. Some men try to follow the script of the “Have you/Do you” dominance ritual with such women, but their added anxiety manifests as aggression and condescension, and their desire to demonstrate authority can clash with the woman’s perception that fandom is about shared enthusiasm. In some cases, the man’s challenges create a no–win situation. Whether the woman is knowledgeable or not—even if the woman knows more than the man—in many if not most cases, the man has no intention of engaging with her as an equal. It is simply too threatening to his self–perceived masculinity. In this way the Box becomes an inadvertent shield against intimacy, one that can cripple a man’s ability to form and maintain relationships.

And yet most of those who live inside the Box would deny that it exists. The social dogma of gender had so imprinted itself upon me that I saw my Box even as recently as five or six years ago as simply a set of characteristics that defined me as a man and a human being; I failed to perceive the psychological constraints that enclosed that space. And nerds, having gone to some additional trouble to create their own space, have heightened levels of anxiety about delineating and defending the boundaries of that space. There is a proprietary attitude about the Nerd Box, whether it contains UNIX and The Matrix, hard science fiction and soft–core porn, or anarchist thought and live–action role–playing. To call the Box into question is to call a man’s identity into question, on some level. In some sense, the character Rob in the film adaptation of High Fidelity summarizes the philosophy of the Box when he says: “[W]hat really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films—these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fucking truth [9][10].” The owner of the Box does not appreciate visitors who tell him that he lives in a Box; his reaction is first to deny that it is there and then to take offense at the suggestion that there might be something wrong with it, since after all he fucking built the thing. His Box is the best Box and in general all other Boxes, all other interests, are inferior and less masculine.

The genius, then, of the Nerd Box is to recode certain activities and interests as masculine, at least within a limited context; the tragedy is that this recoding is still used to bully, exclude, and other.

When we build our own Box, we are creating our own limits. As we age, those of us with the capacity to grow add more and more items into our box, sometimes things that directly or indirectly fly in the face of gender policing: child care, for example, or emotional engagement, or other less masculine–coded activities such as gardening or cooking. And the Box will, in fact, expand to an impressive size, but it will not expand infinitely. As long as we consciously or unconsciously subscribe to the idea that gender is a binary system of oppositions, we cannot be open to the full range of human experience, expression, or emotion. To rid ourselves of the anxiety that is masculinity, we need to destroy the Box.

For myself much of this demolition came all at once, yet after years of slow work. The wrecking ball was the realization that I no longer identified as male, but as genderqueer; the crane was two decades of educating myself on feminism and the experiences of women. The former came as a result of the latter, because without having come to a different understanding of gender I could not have come to understand my own relationship to it. Without understanding the way that the patriarchy both materially benefits men and psychically damages them, I could not have come to recognize the Box for what it was—a game piece symbolic of my participation in a game that I could never win.

We have to talk about that word: patriarchy. I have avoided using it to this point because I know that just seeing or hearing the word causes some people to tune out. Apparently for some “patriarchy” is either a code word that signals that the person speaking need not be taken seriously, or a cryptozoological concept, a sort of sociological chupacabra. The problem may be that people understand patriarchy to refer to a conspiracy, but the truth is—as always—more complicated, and more insidious. Patriarchy describes the predominance of adult men in authority, and the predominance of the concerns of adult men in the culture. For the most part, patriarchy is not something that has been consciously constructed (at least, within living memory), but it is something that is consciously and tenaciously defended by those it benefits, and also by some whose benefit from it is questionable. Patriarchy, like capitalism or American democracy, is a fixed game that is perceived to benefit all (all men, that is) but tends to favor those already in power—in other words, the men in power are likely to hold on to that power, and to pass it on to other men who meet their criteria as men—cis, white, Christian, wealthy, etc [11].

I point this out not to give credence to the tiresome “Not All Men” rebuttal (one that would seem to be effectively euthanized by the Schrodinger’s Rapist concept) but to point out that patriarchy and masculinity are constructs of limited usefulness not just to non–males, but to males themselves, who still fight so fiercely in defense of their Boxes. The Box is not just a badge, of course; it is also a constructed identity, and to be forced to reconstruct one’s identity can be difficult, even traumatic. But it is also liberating, and without feminism I do not see a way for men to experience that liberation.

I won’t say too much about my own identity as a genderqueer person here; it is a complex thing that I don’t fully understand myself, yet. But realizing I was genderqueer was liberating for many reasons, one of them being the ease with which it allowed me to reject the binary that had stunted me and separated me from women, casting them as incomprehensible or as obstacles or both. I had always believed that women were not unlike men, and that they should be taken as individuals rather than as examples of a type; but it took me a very long time to recognize that women were shaped by their experiences just as I had been, and that those experiences were often very, very, different. Experiences of poverty, tragedy, exclusion, etc., may be universal, but it took me a shamefully long time to understand that women’s relationships with men are so deeply informed by patriarchy and the license that it gives men to treat women as commodities or worse. This, I think, is the root of feminism—the very simple conviction that it is not acceptable for men to feel entitled to treat women as though they did not have their own wills and wishes and desires—the radical idea that women are people. Without understanding this, and without listening to and reading women, I could not have come to understand how dramatic the constructed divide between the genders is, and to see it as unacceptable. I could not have realized that no matter where I had built my Box and what I had put into it, defending it was taking a massive toll on me, and I could expect to do so for the rest of my life. The only way to preserve my mental well–being was to abandon that box and to give up the idea of gender as binary, to give up the idea of gender as a system of dominance, to give up even the idea of gender as a spectrum, and to see gender as a complex system of people in motion, exploring a vast untraveled common ground together.

To reject our received understanding of gender does not have to mean that you must be like me, and change the way that you identify. You may still be a man, just not that confused, unattainable “ideal” of a Man. You need not wear skirts or dresses, though they are extremely comfortable, particularly in warm weather. How you present yourself, your name, your pronouns, who you are attracted to—none of these things have to change, though in reconstructing your identity it would seem a lost opportunity not to give consideration to these questions. But surely the Box, that construct built by others as much as by ourselves, that little prison we started building to protect ourselves from things we didn’t even understand yet, the invisible walls that keep us from being vulnerable enough to make connections and train us to see every approach as an assault—surely that can go. Surely we can recognize that as the source of so much of our tension and anxiety. And maybe, for our sons, we can find a way to talk them out of building their own, and to build other things instead.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Specifically, for me, “this culture” refers to white, middle class, Midwestern, Catholic. Your cultural mandates of masculinity may well vary.

[2] I want to make it clear that I don’t subscribe to the popular conceit that gender is entirely a social construct. It is tempting to believe this, and I once espoused this belief, but it is a slippery slope both in terms of logic and of trans–exclusionary talk. To say that every behavior or characteristic that can be connected to gender is learned is to say that every behavior or characteristic is learned, because as it stands gender is essentially inextricable from the rest of us. It is to say that we are all nurture and no nature, that we are all tabula rasa, and I cannot see how this could be true when nearly all of us, at some point or another, have quietly or loudly rebelled against something that we knew was wrong for us, without having to be told that this was so. Biology is not destiny, but neither is our destiny programmed by our upbringing. The truth is much more complex, as is gender, as is everything.

[3] Incidentally, someone ought to do a REAL MAN parody film/show in which the lead character is a Cop Firefighter Mechanic Lawyer Business Man CEO.

[4] This is not to suggest that other genders do not experience (or participate in) gender policing, but a discussion of that lies outside my scope.

[5] This is not to suggest that other genders do not experience (or participate in) gender policing, but a discussion of that lies outside my scope.

[6] An aside: while I’m aware of efforts to reclaim the terms, I find words like geek and nerd extremely troubling and dislike using them unless there is no other term that does the same work of description. “Outsider,” for example, may be anthropologically accurate, but is also used to refer to specific categories of art and music, and is a term that many self–described geeks and nerds may object to. For better or worse, most persons of the type I’ll be discussing—including this author—recognize themselves as geeks or nerds even if they don’t use the terms themselves.

As to my objections, they stem from very much the same source as this essay: when they are first applied to persons growing up male, the words “nerd,” “geek,” “dork,” “dweeb,” etc. are used to convey the message that our masculinity is in question, that our interests and pursuits represent an abdication of the pursuit of manliness. While I reject the binary, I am reluctant to embrace terms that were used to other and exclude me.

[7] The “Nerd Box” as described here is specifically of the type constructed by male nerds.

[8] The significance of the difference between enthusiasm and knowledge may not be immediately apparent. Perhaps it is enough to point out that the former is or can be contagious; the latter is not, or at least, its transmission is more complex, and showing off is not the same as teaching.

[9] High Fidelity. 2000

[10] I would argue that the film version of this story in particular is about a man who becomes aware of the existence of his Box and gains some dim awareness of the ways in which the Box contributes to him being an asshole.

[11] Cop Firefighter Mechanic Lawyer Business Man CEO might be an ideal candidate.

© 2015 David J. Schwartz

A scene from the promotional video for Ellen DeGeneres and Gap's gender-neutral clothing line. Screengrab

When I was working as an ASL interpreter in a high school in rural Nova Scotia, the English teacher announced one day that the class was going to read The Outsiders.

The kids groaned as he handed out the battered paperbacks. Having found the book dated when I read it in my own grade ten English class years earlier, I sympathized with their reactions. But the teacher was determined to secure everyone’s enthusiasm for the plight of the Greasers.

“When S.E. Hinton wrote this book,” he informed us brightly “He was only 16 years old.”

It seemed bizarre that someone who had likely been teaching this book as long as I’d been alive would get such a major fact wrong, so I stayed after class to clarify.

“Um, I’m pretty sure S.E. Hinton is a woman?” I hated that a question had snuck into what I had meant to be a declarative statement.

“Oh I know!” he chuckled. “But the boys won’t want to read it if they know it was written by a girl.”

His perspective was clear. Girl stories were for girls. Boy stories were for everyone.

I felt like a similar thing was happening when I saw a trailer for the new clothing line Ellen Degeneres designed for Gap Kids. According to The Gap, this line is “more than just a clothing collection. It is a social movement meant to empower young girls to be their own heroes.”

As long as ‘feminine’ is treated as a synonym for ‘weak,’ girls are going to continue to be underestimated and boys are going to continue to be bullied when they step out of the gender box they’ve been put in

To be clear, I loved this video the first time I watched it. Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” blares in the background, and adorable little girls play drums and breakdance and ride skateboards and solve math equations. It made me want to high five the entire planet. Never mind that most little girls would much prefer Katy Perry’s “Roar” to a riot grrrl anthem that came out before they were born. The ad was exactly as if someone had plucked a depiction of  “empowering little girls” from the my brain.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Youtube commenters (likely fellow Third Wave Feminists) celebrated the “girl power” of the video. Headlines gushed that Degeneres was “Ripping Apart Stereotypes” and “Blowing Away Gender Roles.”

But let’s just calm down for a moment, take a step back, and pull apart those claims. Is it really that revolutionary for girls to wear pants and muted colours, no matter what the soundtrack? Why does “gender neutral” have to mean “without any traditionally feminine signifiers”?

Because girl clothes are for girls. Boy clothes are for everyone.

I don’t want to downplay the merits of this clothing line, or the importance of advocating for little girls who were so stoked to take their Spiderman backpacks to school this week, only to come home in tears because “Spiderman is for boys.” Not every girl feels like herself when wearing ruffled dresses or head-to-toe pink and purple, and I’m really glad those girls have some other fun choices now. Like graphic tees with quotes like “And though she be but little, she is fierce” (from every little girl’s favourite writer, William Shakespeare).

But the same gender-role-wiggle-room is not available to their brothers. Where is Adam Lambert’s line for Gap Kids, promoted with an upbeat commercial of young boys playing with dolls and doing ballet while wearing shiny sparkly glam clothes and lipgloss while Diamond Rings serenades us all?

If The Gap did this, I think everybody would have what my late Nan would call “a complete conniption fit.” Remember when J. Crew President Jenna Lyons appeared in a picture tickling her delighted son’s toes, whose nails she had just painted pink? It sparked a week’s worth of debates that saw actual doctors calling it “a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity.” as if anything described as a  “trapping” should not obviously be abandoned immediately.

If gender neutral clothes are only made for and marketed to the parents of little girls, it is less a sign of gender equality and more an indication of the misogyny that is so ambient in our culture. There is such a devaluing of anything traditionally feminine that we’d rather chuck it out triumphantly than ever demean our boys with it.

Things weren’t always like this. In Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, historian Jo B. Paoletti reports that just over 100 years ago, boys and girls alike were put in white dresses until they were about six, because they could be easily bleached clean. Once gendered clothes became the trend, initially pink was for boys and blue was for girls, before things switched over to how they are now. But even this colour scheme wasn’t rigidly enforced until ultrasounds in the ’80s would tell parents the sex of their fetus, allowing them to prepare for the birth with “boy things” and “girl things,” as if babies care at all.

As long as “feminine” is treated as a synonym for “weak,” girls are going to continue to be underestimated and boys are going to continue to be bullied when they step out of the gender box they’ve been put in.

Let’s have a moment of appreciation for 16-year-old Jaden Smith, who Instagrammed a picture of himself in a great tunic a few months ago, with the completely sensible caption “Went To TopShop To Buy Some Girl Clothes, I Mean “Clothes”.

He’s right. They’re all just clothes.

So let’s see if someone can make some clothes for boys who like flowers, pastels, cute animals, or sparkly things, too. Because if we’re going to escape the tyranny of all-gendered-everything (special lip balm for men? are you kidding me?), we need to start with letting kids choose clothes from whatever — arbitrarily divided — section of the clothing store they want. All kids, not just the girls.

The Ask the Red Pill subreddit (r/AskTRP) is an odd little creature. While the main Red Pill subreddit is an arena filled to overflowing with comically swaggering self-proclaimed alpha dogs, all competing to out-alpha one another, AskTRP is an endless parade of insecurities.

Ostensibly a place where uncertain Red Pill newbies can turn for advice and worldly wisdom from experienced “alphas,” the subreddit is really an object lesson in the many ways “red pill” thinking can fuck up your life and your relationships. The questions being asked are cringeworthy; the answers only a little less so.

One hapless would-be alpha wonders what to do about his girlfriend … walking in front of him.

Still very knew to TRP. Im not exactly sure how to respond to this. If its a shit test or a symptom of failing many shit tests all together. Anyways, whenever we walk (which we do often, bring dog to park, around the hood, whatever) she tries to walk a half step in front of me.

The horror!

Last time we were walking back the 3 blocks from the market and I was in front she kept speeding up. So I would speed up, the pace got absolutely laughable. How would you deal with this, lets say walking through the park and she keeps jumping out front?

Instead of shaking this “knew” Red Piller and telling him to chill the fuck out because who fucking cares, you could just ask her to slow down a little jesus christ what the fuck is your fucking problem, the regulars offer an assortment of Red Pill clichés seemingly designed to heighten his insecurities and turn his girlfriend’s walking habits into some sort of contest.

Then you set the pace. Slow down and let her ass walk away.

To me this is a chance to play dumb games with her if that’s what she wants to do. Make stops when you want, change directions, go your own way and make her follow your lead.

When in doubt, act like a petulant teenager who’s never been in a relationship before.

Another newbie wonders what to do now that he’s no longer the buffest dude in his church group. No, really.

So long story short ive been going to church and most guys dont lift there or arent in very athletic shape, but today we got a new guy and when he went up to take the podium i felt sort of amogged (biceps wise).

AMOG= Alpha Male of the Group. The dude was out-alphaing him with his giant biceps.

Dude was in a shirt showing off his building like frame and it got to me. My pride took a hit because i could literally feel the temperature rising as the women and men stared in awe of his Sylvester stalone like stature. 

I dunno, ask him out, maybe?

How do i deal with no longer being the one with the most impressive biceps? Can i supplement it with other things? For example, im 3 years older than the dude and i have good game, more knowledge about women’s nature than he does, so do you think its not the end of the world no longer being the most ‘alpha’ looking of the group?

And a would-be alpha teeters on the edge of self-awareness.

I am starting my bulk next week because i realized im not as big as i could be.

… and plunges back into insecurity.

And no, im not insecure im just curious about how to stand out as alpha amongst someone twice your size. The girls were giving me the googly eyes before and id like to keep it that way. I must stay AMOG .

Dude, get a grip on yourself.

In this case, the advice is much less cringey than the question. Sure, there’s one guy who tells him he absolutely needs to get bigger and buffer than his new rival, and another who sniffs that “‘going to church’ is kinda beta in my books,” but a few others tell him to, you know, not get so fixated on the size of another dude’s biceps, because that way endless insecurity lies.

there’s always going to be somebody bigger and better at something than you are. you should work on not letting it effect you more than you should work on getting bigger than the bigger guy or smarter than the smarter guy.

Elsewhere in the subreddit, another would-be alpha is stunned to discover that, contrary to a lot of Red Pill “teachings,” acting like a serial killer doesn’t always inspire adoration from the ladies. After snapchatting flirtatiously with a new prospect, he reports,

she tells me I scare her. I ask how do I scare her and she says she gets dark vibes from me. One of my public snapchat stories was a demonic doodle for shits, gigs, and boredom. I tell her she’s not wrong (I told her in an earlier convo that I’m an asshole) and that she gives off soft sensual vibes.

That’s a first for me to be told I’m scary. I’m not overly concerned but I was surprised that the whole dark thing took a turn that made her stop engaging with me. I thought it was like catnip.

So, so close to self-awareness.

The regulars aren’t much help. “Amused mastery,” advises one. Take her for a ride on your motorcycle, advises another. Still another suggests what he apparently thinks is “humor.”

[Agree] & [Amplify] with a sexual twist. “Yeah I get that a lot cuz I make the ladies scream” gotta be witty man especially when texting / snapping sexual stuff.

Another notes that real serial killer types don’t actually try to come across as serial killer types.

Dark triad isn’t attractive as such imo; there’s an overlap between alpha traits and dark triad traits, sure, and that is what the girls want while the rest is a turn off. Actual psychopaths wear a facade and don’t show their true colors when they want to manipulate people; there’s a reason for that.

WWTBD: What Would Ted Bundy Do?

In another thread, an aspiring alpha wonders if it might be a good idea to read something other than The Red Pill subreddit or self-help books.

So I woke up today and I work through tasks for like 4 hours, rest, go to the gym, watch a movie (going through the IMBD top 100 so I catch up with pop culture so I can entertain a conversation with a boring girl sometimes),

Wat.

then right back to cleaning room / washing clothes. I was thinking about getting a fiction book from this list:

He links to a rather unimaginative list of old-school literary classics that he found on a forum devoted to fitness.

But then I thought… “What would Red pill do in my position”. I could be meditating or continuing to read through Book of Pook or these other books but I feel like I should also be giving myself time when I don’t work. How valid is that? Lastly… fiction, or no fiction?

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I’m not going to bother with the answers here; suffice it to say that they’re a bit less cringey than the questions.

But it’s striking how many of these would-be alphas sound like the most insecure dudes on planet earth.

I mean, sure, everyone deals with insecurity. And there are few people more insecure than those who, like a lot of these guys, are starting to date for the first time. But fucking hell, man,

The problem isn’t just that “Red Pill” wisdom is turning them into assholes. The Red Pill is quite obviously amplifying their anxieties as well. It’s hard enough to introduce yourself to someone you’re attracted to, but it’s a lot harder if you’re also obsessing about being the Alpha Male of the Group.

Seriously, guys. Chill out. Trying to banish your insecurities by becoming the buffest dude in the church group — or the smoothest Game-spitter at the club — isn’t going to work.

The Red Pill won’t get rid of your insecurities; it will only encourage you to overcompensate for them with misogynistic macho bluster. You won’t emerge from your Red Pill training a happy, secure man who’s a natural with women; you’ll end up an embittered asshole preening and posturing on The Red Pill subreddit. And that’s the BEST CASE SCENARIO.

Fuck that. Be who you are. Read whatever books you want. Stop freaking out that your girlfriend walks a couple of paces ahead of you. Banish the word “alpha” from your life. Move the fuck on.

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So one Twitter Nazi recently had a bright white idea: Why not try to pick up women on Tinder using the neo-Nazi catechism known as “The Fourteen Words?”

The results so far? Let’s just say they’ve been mixed.

The guy who came up with the idea reports some successes, at least in getting women to respond to his initial message.

The first woman thinks he’s joking, and seems to be making fun of white supremacists; the second one, presumably tired of crude sexual come-ons and uninspired “hi’s,” gives him props for originality.

We have no idea where the conversations went after that.

Others who tried the Fourteen Words didn’t do quite so well. On 8chan’s Nazi-heavy /pol/ board (thread archived here), one self-described ” fairly attractive aryan dude” reports this conversation he had on Tinder with a “pretty average aryan” gal.

Me:
>We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.

Her:
>Let’s be honest the world would be better off without white people anyways.

Me:
>How so? We’d lose out on every major scientific advancement and pretty much all of modern civilization.
>White people are the least racist and most compassionate and civilized on the planet. Thats why we take in so many migrants into our well-established civilizations.

Her:
>Sarcasm or white supremacy? Hard to tell

Me:
>You just advocated for the genocide of all white people. Replace white people in your first reply with any other race and read it out.

Her:
>I get what you’re saying but I don’t advocate for the genocide of my own race, I just think that we’d be better off without the superiority of old white men through history. Also, I wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to preserve the future of my race.

>Unmatches/blocks me

But hope springs eternal in the neo-Nazi heart. When another 8channer suggests that arguing with women about the alleged superiority of the white race might not be the most effective way to a woman’s heart, “fairly attractive aryan dude” insists that he was actually doing great with the woman who blocked him on Tinder, because in the magical land of the pickup artists, annoying random women is a kind of triumph, if you think about it.

Buddy, I don’t think you get it. This was a huge success in terms of turning her on. I could’ve turned this into a date easily but I decided to go full sperg master debater and crash the plane with no survivors. Let’s explore why this was a success in terms of courting the modern woman and turning her on:

>Got her to reply immediately and emotionally invest into the conversation from the fucking pickup line.

That’s a fucking bingo.

>I stood out from every other fucking beta that messages her typical tinder normalfag shit.

Win. Now I really have her attention.
>Got her to reply to me multiple times, she ended up typing almost as much as I did.
>Got her to contribute to the conversation.
Chicks love this shit because it stands out and gets their vagina juices flowing. Negative emotional reaction is better than no emotional reaction.

And besides, he adds in another comment,

this chick wasn’t the prettiest despite having blonde hair and blue eyes, pretty chubby, not even curvy, not waifu material.

That chick was definitely sour!

One /pol/ commenter hopes that “white nationalism becomes the new ‘negging.'”

Another reassures his Aryan brothers that they are indeed the most handsomest of all the races:

We are most attractive for a reason. This should not be a shock to any mentally strong white male that has pride in his own people and their achievements. …

In an analysis of online porn trends worldwide almost every region on earth the most popular porn trends are usually searches for the regions own ethnicity. Interracial porn doesn’t break the top ten for any region. …

Interracial porn is created and sold at a loss. It isn’t profitable, and it actually hurts the actresses career to participate in it.

Blacks being attractive to any other race except other blacks is a myth for the most part. It’s pushed in order to demoralize young white males into believing they’re inferior sexually. Reality is the exact opposite though.

White women like white men, white men just do not act like men. Stop wasting your life away looking at porn. Stop being weak. Become strong, mentally and physically. Be a man. Do not just sit around and pout when it seems difficult, that’s what women do. Fight tooth and nail to make yourself the man you were supposed to be. Be the man your ancest

And bla bla bla more Nazi crap.

Elsewhere in the thread, assorted anons post screencaps of their own Fourteen Words pickup attempts. The responses range from amusement to disgust, and most of the conversations seem to have ended quickly, or turned into an argument.

One anon laments that his Aryan brothers don’t seem to understand trolling at all.

you guys have to make it fun. don’t lecture and kill the fun. crime statistics is as spergish as it gets.
you want to give her white babies to save the white race. it’s only half serious, you obviously just want to fuck her. throw in a SIEG HEIL or something silly to stick with the theme.
_no one_ wants to be “redpilled” on fucking Tinder. come on.

Or anywhere else, really.

“GO BACK TO THE KITCHEN AND MAKE ME A SANDWICH!11!11!” —an old Internet proverb

To be a woman who dares overstep her place in the physical or the digital worlds is to be branded a target by men, men who wish to return to halcyon days: of women only seen (except when they shouldn’t be) but not heard, of apron-donning, of apple-cheeked ma’ams bowing to their every whim. For these men, food — or rather, feeding — is the second most important women’s work (with the first being to create/carry/raise the man’s children), and the domestic kitchen is the only place a woman should be when she isn’t tidying up the homestead or on her knees.

Note “domestic,” since every woman-in-the-kitchen joke should include an asterisk that of course, you wouldn’t mean the professional kitchen, as those are still dominated by men. A 2014 study found that 95% of executive chefs (those running the kitchen) are men, while a 2005 study cited in Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre’s book Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen puts the percentage of men working as sous chefs (second-in-commands in the kitchen) at 82% and as line cooks (the ones you see sweating and running behind burners) at 66%.

Where do women dominate? Of course, at pastries: Flowery, delicate, intricate pastries that would collapse under strong, calloused man hands. But dessert is only the powdered cherry on top of beautiful man food (aka the stuff you pay for) rather than home food (aka the stuff your mom makes you because she has to  — because she’s a woman, because she belongs in the kitchen, etc. etc. etc.)

The formal food industry is in awe of men who create, cook, and critique each other’s amazing, not-at-all-inane skill sets. (There are few household female food icons, and most of them also operate in entertainment media.) Just look at how men used to write about cooking for men, by men, in Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite’s dissection of the 1949 Esquire Handbook (now just Esquire) for The Awl:

A bride takes up cooking because she must, whether she’s an eat-to-live gal or just medium-bored with the whole idea. But a man takes to the stove because he is interested in cooking, therefore he has long been interested in eating and therefore he starts six lengths in front of the average female … After suffering steam-table tastelessness or misplaced housewifely economy, any palate will perk up at the taste of fresh fish, properly prepared—by a man. (Women don’t seem to understand fish—and, we suppose, vice versa.)

As Aggarwal-Schifellite puts it, “The Handbook shows over and over again that women have no choice but to cook bland food and throw boring parties, but a man can choose to do those things better than women, which allows him some semblance of control over his life. It also reinforced the Esquire man’s superiority over women, precisely because he could choose to take over her domain, and with the right training, he could do it in a way that would garner respect from both women and men in his life.” Or, as author Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket wrote in a piece for More,“it’s immediately clear that the world demands more of girls … A good girlfriend should do the laundry and maybe plan a dinner party when her guy’s parents come to town. A good boyfriend just has to not make passes at her friends. A good husband should have a job and not get violent; a good wife runs the whole damn show.” A good woman thanklessly does the day-to-day food labor; a good man does it infrequently and drowns in delighted praise.

(Aside: what makes an “eat-to-live” gal different from a regular gal? Are there eat-to-die gals? Eat-to-only-enjoy-but-not-live gals? Why has the notion of woman as food consumer remained so hard to grasp, especially in an age where it’s mostly women writing odes to Eat 24 and Seamless online and Instagramming every cupcake they come across? Why do all domestic kitchen magazine spreads look like set pieces for charity dinner film scenes? Why haven’t there been more high profile leaps by women between the food blog world and restaurant kitchens? Women are cooking, and eating, more visibly than before…and yet.)

The backbone of the food industry relies on female labor, particularly in the realm of big agriculture. The image of the farmer will still conjure a solitary white male figure, gazing across fields of grain (see: Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar), even as machinery and mass human labor drive the reality of the business. The love affair between men and big machines holds strong, but while women may not always be pictured behind the wheels of tractors and combines, they’re certainly picking fruit, planting and harvesting rice and millet and cocoa, and working in food processing factories.

When it comes to the final product, as with most things, the domestic, “amateur” reflection of the elevated “prestige” profession is more populated by women, and carries with it connotations of frivolity, excess, and bare competence, despite the fact that social food sharing is open to and done by everyone. The culinary profession is a perfect example of University of Texas Austin professor CL Williams’s “glass escalator,” which suggests that men are often propelled to the top of prestigious professions faster than women, leading to increased visibility for men in a shorter time frame.

That might sound preposterous — in a world of Food Network and reality cooking TV, we can all list a slew of female chef personalities, but everyone from Julia to Giada to Ina to Padma wouldn’t exist without a screen on which a viewer can tune in. Meanwhile, a cursory Google search for “the best chefs in the world” runs through 18 male chefs before they even get to Julia freakin’ Child, while this 2010 Epicurious roundup names 15 men, almost all of them white, as modern cooking’s most iconic chefs. Though there’s surely an issue with racial diversity within the visible capital-F Food world, at least I can think of Marcus Samuelsson, Roy Choi, Aarón Sánchez, David Chang and their various modern commercial culinary endeavors. As for women of color, there’s Gina Neely, whose show ended in 2012, Aarti Sequeira, Maneet Chauhan, Kristen Kish, and Padma Lakshmi, who’s almost definitely on screen for more than her taste profile. And since 2000, only three female chefs have won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef category. (In that same time, five male chefs have won the Outstanding Pastry Chef category.)

So, why are so many of the “best chefs” men? It’s certainly not because women can’t cook—after all, that’s why they’re in the kitchen—but rather because the professional kitchen environment is still comparable to that of a frat house or any sort of brotherhood-inspired society or field (see also: tech, sports fandom, physically intensive and/or blue collar jobs). As a 2011 post on The Feminist Kitchen posits:

There is a fine line for what is considered acceptable behavior for women in this “macho” environment. Women described themselves as “invaders” of men chef’s turf, and their male supervisors often had preconceived ideas that women were not physically and emotionally strong enough to work in kitchens and would give them fewer high-status jobs…

But the women had to be careful. If they acted too masculine, such as brusquely giving orders like men chefs, this could get them labeled “bitchy” and undermine their authority. Other women took a more feminine approach and a caring attitude about staff. They also “got their hands dirty” doing some of the less desirable kitchen jobs to demonstrate their commitment to teamwork. This made their male coworkers view them as mothers or big sisters in the kitchen — two feminine authority figures —but it was a fine line between encouraging teamwork and being a pushover.

In addition to the age-old “how do you play with the boys” dilemma, there’s also the perceived and real time commitment, itself based off of the assumption that female chefs are concurrently also dealing with the same-old issues of fighting the biological clock and then actively raising children, an assumption not also placed on male chefs. (The idea of a chef as a sexy playboy bachelor [thanks, Anthony Bourdain] doesn’t have a female counterpart.) Because while many women take their place in the professional food world’s lower ranks, they’re forced, whether they themselves worry about the issue or not, to confront their womanhood and its perceived effect on their ability to work.

Case in point: Three-Michelin-starred French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten said, in a Bloomberg inquiry into the dearth of high-ranking chefs in kitchens, “Many times when ladies become sous-chefs, as soon as they hit 27, 28, 30, they want to have a family. It changes everything. The ticking clock makes a difference. Women, they need a life more than men somehow, non?” In the same article, he describes the only female chef de cuisine in his restaurant emporium as such: “She’s an excellent chef. Very committed. Very pretty girl. She should be a model, not a cook.”

Of course, one might expect a middle-aged French dude to give that answer. How do the laypeople working in professional kitchens think? One Quora post by a male chef suggests that the issue is rather the perception of the celebrity chef, which places acceptable figureheads in place rather than honor the laborers, of all sexes and genders, who make those kitchens tick. In the same post, though, he suggests that women “aren’t crazy enough” to go deep into the kitchen world, and that the “bad boy” posturing that makes male chefs appealing — and encourages men to get into the business — simply isn’t applicable for women.

As for female chefs, there are generally two lines of thought, which are often adopted by women in other male-dominated industries: What gender bias? versus This is real and we need to talk about it. (See: New York Magazine in 2007 and Eater in 2013.) Many female chefs have the defensive undertone typical of people who gained their current power from white men, which is about right for an industry in which cases like Barbara Lynch’s mentorship of eventual Top Chef winner Kish are so unique as to warrant their own New York Times Magazine profile.

Indeed, woman-to-woman mentorship within the field might be the only real way to change the industry. Scholarships certainly help with the cost, but aren’t necessarily the most effective way to get women to stay. Some female chef mentorship program exist within the Women Chefs & Restaurateurs network and SheChef; programs by the French Culinary Institute and the James Beard Foundation suffer from having disappeared since 2002 and having mostly male mentors, respectively.

Looking away from the industry itself, the cultural associations around the word “chef” still very much exist. Gendered occupations in themselves, though now rightfully under siege, still draw invisible lines in the sand: think of your firefighter, your ballet teacher, your secretary, your engineer. But for something like food, universal in its necessity and importance, those assumptions should be banished by the sheer ubiquity and impartiality of its demand. Sure, one can trace some sort of abstract thought lineage to the popular image of our species’ hunter-gatherer days, wherein the physically stronger males brought home the meat that bulked our meager prehistoric forms, while females foraged greens, roots, fruits, and fungi to supplement for lean stretches. But often glossed over is that women learned to tan hides and boil down fats; they helped smoke and save meat alongside men; and in cultures around the world, men and women hunted and cooked together until industrialization forced that model of food preparation into exceptional obsolescence.

The idea of the woman waiting for her man’s fresh catch in order to prepare it for the family just so is, on its own, a defunct notion. But the notion that a woman buys, prepares, and cooks the household food, or at the very least worries about it, isn’t so foreign in many households. Just think of your favorite home-cooked meal — how many of you thought exclusively of your father chopping up produce and checking on pots, your grandfather’s warm stews wafting through the rooms of your home? Who did you call on when you came back from school with a rumble in your belly? Whose ire did you rouse when you snacked before dinner; whose feelings did you hurt when you pushed away your meal?

A memory, composed of many: Setting the table under my mother’s watchful eye as she prepped meals, many times multiple dishes for multiple days at once, while my father puttered around the house until the very last minute. On those occasions when my mother was too tired to cook, out of town, or celebrating a very special occasion, we’d head to a Burger King, a local restaurant, or a McCormick & Schmick’s-level mall eatery — all treats that I sought away from the boring and “ethnic” stuff we got for dinner every day. I repeat: my mother cooked me homemade meals from family recipes for most of my life, and I oftentimes wanted nothing more than to eat anything else, save a few choice labor-intensive dishes.

What I didn’t know! — and now, I long for stir-fried spongy bean curd, soupy tomatoes with eggs and sesame oil, pork bone stock soups with cellophane noodles and cabbage, steamed sea bass with special Asian market soy sauce. Yes, the tastes and smells alone have me pining, but these memories are also visual and auditory and tactile: kitchen aprons hanging from a hook on the fridge; chopping sounds amidst sizzling pans and the buzz of the nightly news; the cooking burns and scars on my mother’s otherwise unmarred hands and arms.

I know I was lucky to have a mother who cared equally about her child’s nutrition and taste buds, and who was really, really good at cooking. For many people with less harmonious, Norman Rockwell-esque memories, family meals were the thing that Mom did or at least tried to do. I don’t particularly envy those who grew up with dry meat loaves, “creamed” vegetables, and lettuce-heavy salads — but whatever else, those mothers, almost always mothers, fought against the odds, including perhaps the knowledge that whatever they whipped up in their kitchens would never dazzle quite as brightly or tempt quite as readily as food that had to be prepared by others, bought, and then hand-delivered. Money equals value, but money also imparts value. You do not grow up knowing the exact price or the time units that went into your meals, only the things that pass your lips.

Tags: cooking, feminism, food, gender, lilian min, women, work

Because they cannot motivate themselves? Who knows! But according to
Trending in China (via Tech in Asia), “programming cheerleaders” apparently exist.

Here’s Trending in China explaining what’s going on:

Internet companies across China are embracing programming cheerleaders, pretty, talented girls that help create a fun work environment. Their job includes buying programmers breakfast, chitchatting and playing ping-pong with them.

Eh... Trending in China doesn’t give exact numbers for how many companies are doing this.

In the top photo, you can see a woman programmer, but it doesn’t look like the company hired a dude cheerleader.

[Photo: Trending in China]

An HR manager at an internet company in China that hired three such cheerleaders tells Trending in China that its programmers are “mostly male” and stink at socializing.

[Photo: Trending in China]

Reportedly, productivity is up at the company, and supposedly, the cheerleaders are helping programmers get more work done. But it all seems rather patronizing—for both the cheerleaders and the programmers. So, uh, yeah.

[Photo: Trending in China]

Top photo: Trending in China

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter@Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

Here is the “middle ground” on vaccines as it exists in America today: don’t vaccinate your kids if your Internet message board/life coach/talking dog sidekick advises against it, but a public school may bar you from enrolling. That’s the stance Carly Fiorina took when talking to a potential voter and mother of five who says she won’t allow her kids to receive vaccines made from “aborted babies.”

From the Washington Post, recounting a campaign stop Fiorina made this week in Iowa:

“When in doubt, it is always the parent’s choice,” Fiorina said during a town hall in an agricultural building in rural Iowa on Thursday evening. “When in doubt, it must always be the parent’s choice.”

Fiorina’s comment came in response to a question from a mother of five children who said that because of her religious beliefs, she will not allow her children to receive any vaccines that were created using cells from “aborted babies.” Fiorina told the woman that parents must be allowed to make such decisions.

“We must protect religious liberty and someone’s ability to practice their religion,” said Fiorina, receiving a round of applause. “We must devote energy and resources to doing so. Period.”

48 states currently offer a religious exemption for vaccines, while 17 also offer a “philosophical” one. Vaccines don’t contain “aborted babies,” fetal tissue, or any other type of human cells. But vaccination is back in the news because of a recent wholesale freakout in California after the state passed a law narrowing its “personal belief” exemption. Once the law takes effect, most schools and day cares won’t admit children who haven’t been fully vaccinated, unless they have a religious or medical exemption.

In talking to reporters, the Post adds, Fiorina also found time to mention that she does believe public schools can bar unvaccinated children from enrollment:

“When you have highly communicable diseases where we have a vaccine that’s proven, like measles or mumps, then I think a parent can make that choice — but then I think a school district is well within their rights to say: ‘I’m sorry, your child cannot then attend public school.’ So a parent has to make that trade-off.”

For some shots, anyway; Fiorina also referred without elaboration to “these more esoteric immunizations,” which she doesn’t think should be required to enroll in a public school. She might be referring to the HPV vaccine, which she’d said earlier that her own daughter didn’t want to get for her child. The HPV vaccine is not mandatory for school entry.

Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6

Image o via AP.

“Video games are a boy thing,” my sister explains to me. “I feel like it’s a known fact. GameStop is a boy store. The commercials are for boys. It’s just something everyone knows.”

My sister is 17. She runs a One Direction fan Twitter with 10,000 followers. She plans to major in fashion marketing. She’s a cheerleader. She is as close as anyone can get to what gaming’s sweaty fever dreams envision, desire, and shame as "Girl."

Like me, she knows from personal experience that girls play video games, and would hotly defend it if challenged. But a second tenet holds sway, as contrary as it is simultaneous: video games are for boys. The video games we’ve played don’t count. They’re concessions, scraps, snatches at the lucrative attention of little girls. It's not that my sister and I don’t like real games; it's that the games we like aren’t real.

I ask about Style Savvy, Cooking Mama, Super Princess Peach—games she played without fanfare, without self-doubt, surrounded by torn-out Tiger Beat posters. Weren’t those fun? Didn’t she spend hours with friends, swapping Nintendogs? Doesn’t she remember the giggly hours she devoted to Club Penguin?

“Oh yeah, those were fun,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t grow out of video games. Maybe video games just didn’t grow up with me.”

It would be easy to cast my sister and I as opposites. I received a book of essays on The Scarlet Letter for my 16th birthday. She received Our Moment, the One Direction branded fragrance. I went to a college where I devoted myself to post-war politics and anime screenings. She dreams of a higher education experience full of tailgating and adorably slouched cardigans. A teen movie would have a field day: she, the blue-eyed beauty in a LOVE PINK hoodie, blinking blankly as she holds an Xbox controller upside down. I, the frizz-headed harpy, explaining that my half-elf duchess of darkness uses water spells, not fire.

But I nod in agreement. “Yeah. Same.”

I have a Steam account. I have a favorite Soul Calibur title. But fundamentally, we feel the same: not gamers, not welcome, and not interested in most of what we see at GameStop. Those years we spent swapping DS cartridges were, for the both of us, our only experience of games as uncomplicated fun. Then we grew up, and an avalanche of qualifiers buried us.

We’re not gamers. We don’t play real games. We should stay out. My proximity to nerdhood, her proximity to the mainstream—neither matters. Video games did not grow up with us; video games did not grow up for us.

I press my sister to explain how she knows games are a “boy thing,” how everyone “just knows this.” “I don’t know,” she answers tentatively. “Y’know, the commercials, and... everything. All of it. You know?” It’s difficult to explain why and how she just knows, in part because parsing the roots of any sociological phenomenon is difficult, but also because it’s just such an immutable fact for us.

For girls who do not fight to be a part of the club, who are not conversant in that world of quarter-circles and Konami codes, it’s as codified as all the other gendered tenets of our lives. Video games aren’t for us the way football and finance aren’t for us: sure, there are girls who break in, and we applaud them for it at a comfortable distance. But where there is a welcome mat rolled out for men, there is only a bloodied stretch of briar for women. And it’s just not something we have in us to brave.

There are girls and women who do not feel this way. Which is not to say they feel at ease in gaming, but they at least demanded a space there, and knew it to be theirs. I understand this: it’s how I feel towards the world of comic books, where I am comfortably ensconced as both a fan and critic. I knew I was not welcome, but I fought for my right to be present, to master the lingo, to insist on entering the conversation. It was a truth I knew in my bones: comics were mine, and no jumped-up fanboy who’d never even heard of Jackie Ormes could obscure my truth.

When it comes to gaming, however, I am bereft of such confidence. I shrug and sound very much like the dozens of women I have known who protest that their love of Raina Telgemeier and Archie Double Digests does not make them a real fan. I don’t get games, I argue. Don’t pass me the controller, I’ll only embarrass myself. It’s not my turf. It’s not for me. I’m a girl, ok?

This is our reality, and that of so many women, one that is silent, vast, yet largely unremarked upon wherever gaming is discussed. How did we learn this, I ask her again. How did our friends learn it? How did our mother? How do so many women, even today, learn that video games are not for them?

“It’s everything,” she says. There is a pause. “And everyone knows it. I mean, there are girls who game. But everyone knows it’s not for them. But... yeah, it’s everything.” Over the following hour, we dissect “everything” as best we can. We find that, broadly speaking, there are three forces at work in teaching girls that video games are not for them.

The first force is disqualification: It takes into account the fact that girls almost certainly have played video games, but then carefully categorizes the games they're most likely to play as illegitimate. It’s not hard to find this attitude wherever games are discussed. A mystery thriller like Her Story, a narrative exploration game like Gone Home, bestselling titles like Animal Crossing and The Sims, all manner of virtual pet sites: Not real games! Walking simulators! Boring! Easy! Dealing with women’s emotions, not having guns, or simply being enjoyed by women en masse—all of these qualities act as disqualifiers. It's not just that women supposedly aren't interested in games; it's that the mere presence of femininity defines the games they like out of existence.

It didn't always feel this way, of course.

“All my friends had a Nintendo DS when we were little,” my sister recalls. “I was really happy to find games related to my interests. Like, Style Savvy—that was my first step into fashion, really, as something I wanted to do.” I remember her unwrapping a DS for Christmas, in fact, her eyes bright, the games beside it in a candy-colored stack. “Remember Elizabeth, across the street? I’d go up to her room when we were like, 9 years old. We’d play Nintendogs and Cooking Mama. All my friends did it. No one was shy about it.”

My early relationship to video games was similarly untroubled. I played Purple Moon games on our stout little Gateway PC, Pokemon and Harvest Moon with a chunky, colorless Gameboy, Neopets during the hottest part of the summer. And for a while, it was something everyone did. A female friend painstakingly pieced together a Pokemon newsletter and disseminated it to our entire third grade class, all of us hungry for rumors of “Pikablu.” Everyone got together for Math Blasters during free time. It was the late 1990s and my friends and I were just young enough, just high enough on Girl Power! to approach video games as we approached books, movies and TVs: as ours, inherently, and may the spirits of the Spice Girls damn anyone saying otherwise.

But something changed during those latter elementary school years, as the boys started huddling together to talk Starcraft and Grand Theft Auto—as their masculinity began to ossify around ideas of not-like-girls, our femininity limited by ideas of not-for-girls. The rules changed as we learned to mold ourselves into pleasing shapes, as the boys began to look at us less like people and more like objects to spurn and/or pursue. We were not they, and our entertainment became as segregated as everything else. And as with everything else, anything on the side of “girl” fell beneath anything on the side of “boy” in worthiness.

“Girl games,” like my sister played—games explicitly intended for that audience, often marked by glitter and pastel colors—are the sole province of those young years, before the chasm between “girl” and “boy” rips open. And in this new light, we learned to look back at them and shrug. They didn’t matter. They weren’t real games. We left them behind as artifacts of childhood: loved, but ultimately relinquished.

Games grow up with boys from that point forward. We are welcome as long as we don’t drag anything that might exclude boys along—as long, essentially, as we are assimilative and quiet about it. And even then, that variety of game—Mario Kart, Angry Birds, Bejeweled—are roundly derided as barely being games at all. Anything without the requisite genuflection to the almighty god of Boy’s Interests is not a real game, it turns out.

“Girl” becomes incompatible with “video games,” just as “boy” aligns with them. “Everyone knows it,” my sister repeats. What about the girls who do play the games that "count," I ask? Surely she knows they exist.

“They exist,” my sister ventures. “But it’s way harder for them.”

This is the second force that teaches girls video games aren’t for them: the social hierarchy of the gaming community, and the narrow, deforming spaces it offers to the women who do persevere. “They have to become one of two types. There’s the one gamer boys think is really hot, and they want her around, and they want to play games with her. But they’re still going to make her uncomfortable and say really explicit shit. I see it happen. If she’s cute, they tell her, ‘oh, I want to fuck you,’ and if she says no, she’s a bitch. She can’t complain.”

And the other type? “The other type,” she says, “is the ‘weird’ gamer girl who sits alone in the cafeteria with her DS while the gamer dudes call her fat and ugly. Both girls get put down by guys. And anyway, gamer boys try to own gaming. They claim it as theirs, as a boy thing. They automatically think girls are doing it for attention. No girl wins.”

My sister’s insight is startling to me. She’s never seen the way online harassment of women in games often centers around a woman’s sex life or looks. She doesn’t know about projects like Feminist Frequency, and the way even its most basic critiques of overt misogyny inspire firestorms of hatred. She doesn’t know about “fake geek girl” jokes. She doesn’t know that something called “Gamergate” swamped everything having to do with games in virulent hatred for months, destroying careers and too many people’s peace of mind, and leaving me reluctant even to write this piece. But she doesn’t have to know these things. The collision of gaming and misogyny is apparent to her from a few cafeteria tables away.

She has come to understand that gaming is obsessed with her as a fuckable object, but not a human being. “It’s all about women’s bodies,” she says. “It’s gross.” Women’s bodies. Not women’s words, women’s feelings, women’s dreams, women entire.

What of those gamer boys, unto themselves? “With the really serious ones, you feel like you don’t even know enough to begin talking to them.” There is the implicit understanding of this litmus test, and of it being exclusively imposed upon girls. “Guys get older and think they’re superior and there’s just this whole other boundary put up. The older you get, the less acceptable it is for girls to play video games.” My sister pauses thoughtfully. “But it’s not like girls grow out of games, exactly... It's that can get away with it. Growing up, I stopped feeling like I could take my DS anywhere, because boys would judge.”

She goes silent. When she speaks again, her words are tentative. “But it isn’t like those games stopped being fun. I didn’t age out of games. I... gendered out of them, I guess?”

I describe games like Journey, Transistor, Life is Strange, and Portal to her: games with female protagonists, created by women, resistant to dominant norms of sex and violence. “I don’t see commercials for those, though,” she demurs. “I see those Kate Upton commercials instead.”

This is the third force: marketing. “There aren’t really any games that seem positive to me,” my sister explains. “They’re all about violence and nudity. I don’t like how the female body is made out. It makes me really uncomfortable. All of the commercials are for guys.”

She doesn’t know about Never Alone. She doesn’t know about Gone Home. But she knows about Kate Upton in a strategically knotted bed sheet. She knows about Booker DeWitt and his face-shredding skyhook. Anything beneath that top stratum of blood and jiggle is invisible to her. So why would she go spelunking into gaming with no clear purpose? Why would she assume there’s anything worthwhile out there for her to discover? Without me, she’d never have heard of all the progressive indie titles I rattle off, and would have no reason to believe they exist. She doesn’t know about Steam; she doesn’t even really know about PC gaming period.

For my sister, and so many girls and women like her, the gaming marketplace begins and ends with these mainstream visions of gaming, and the mainstream stores like Game Stop that sell them. “It’s obviously for boys. The nudity of course, but even the colors. From what I see, they mostly hire boys.” We discuss the posters and cardboard stand-ups we’ve seen in their windows: stubbly white men cradling bricks of oily black weaponry, or half-naked voluptuous women with pouting, glossy lips inviting the onlooker to ogle. Be the hero, over and over again, in a million monochrome worlds: crush the bad guy, fuck the woman, do a whole lot of shooting in between. Games are fantasy and fun, the marketing tells us. Fantasy and fun built upon our backs.

Our phone call falters, mired by my sister’s sad insight. How could the industry and community make this right, I ask? What would make you feel welcome? What could have kept me from a lifetime of fearful distance from gaming—even the games I love?

“Maybe if they developed games for all interests,” she says tentatively. “Stuff like the games I liked when I was little, but... grown up. Games about everything. And if the stores especially were just more friendly? And less sexual. Less violent.” She pauses. “You need to make people want to come in, you know? Girls want to be comfortable there. They don’t want to go in and be surrounded by that kind of female nudity.”

I agree, and we discuss what changes we’d make. We remember breeding Nintendogs, not-quite-swear-words on Club Penguin, Princess Peach’s magical parasol. The fun we had, the adventures we shared, the friends we made. “Cooking Mama!” she exclaims. “I loved Cooking Mama. It was so much fun.” I agree, recalling the tricky stylus technique one mastered over the course of many digital omelets. I can nearly hear her smile travel through the phone. “That’s what I want,” she says, wistfully. “More Cooking Mama games.”

And that’s certainly what we need: more games featuring women, made by women, willing to tell stories about pop stars, witches, and queens, willing to work in palettes beyond army drab. But that will be meaningless if our understanding of what a game is and who a gamer can be does not expand wide enough or visibly enough to reach and include my little sister.

She wants to play games where women make the world beautiful, save the day, make friends, or romance boys. She wants to play games without killing, without rape, without weaponry. She wants to play games that don’t assume you grew up on GameFAQS or have hundreds of dollars to shell out on hardware upgrades. She wants games on her phone. She wants game in her browser. She wants to live in a world where games are just as aligned with girlhood as boyhood, and where no one bats an eye at a girl like her loving video games alongside One Direction fanfiction and scented candles.

In a way, it's simple; she just wants games to be for her exactly what they are for boys and men: easy to love. Why does that have to be so hard?

Illo: Rob Beschizza. Photo: Shutterstock

Some daughters are very close with their mothers. They talk on the phone at least once a day, share secrets, and when it’s time to get married, these daughters want their mothers to be involved, very involved, right down to attending their raunchy bachelorette weekend. Wait, what? Whaaaaat?

The Times reports that the today’s mothers-of-the-bride are hipper and cooler and closer with their daughters, so they want to hang, especially if the hanging means drinking with the girls and giggling over penis necklaces. But the trend isn’t that some mom is attending chill bachelorette festivities held at a local dive or in someone’s basement; that’s not super weird. We’re talking about about the moms who are flying to Miami and Vegas to throw down at hard-partying bachelorette parties — and daughters are increasingly cool with this. One mother went so far as to secure a V.I.P. table at a male strip club for her daughter’s bachelorette and even supplied the dollar bills, because mom always remembers the important details. <3

Why is this happening? Experts note that social media—everyone’s favorite scapegoat—frequently dissolves the line between Parent and Friend; if your mom follows both you and all of your friends on Instagram and is liking every ka-razy photo you guys post, she’s inserted herself into your virtual social circle enough that it supposedly won’t seem weird or beyond the lines of social acceptability if she tags along for one last sowing of your wild oats (disagree, but okay). Moreover, weddings—and the long, convoluted string of events leading up to the big day—have become so goddamned important that it’s not unexpected that moms would want a chance to co-star in any part of the celebration.

Novelist Saralee Rosenberg, age 60, is one such mother. And what she tells the Times is kinda sad.

For Ms. Rosenberg, the idea of being part of the celebration was a second chance to experience something she had missed. She met her husband on a blind date when she was 22; a year later, they were married.

“My parents didn’t think it would last, so I didn’t have a big wedding or an engagement party, let alone a bachelorette party,” she said. “When I had two daughters, I thought, ‘I’ll live vicariously through them.’ ”

I am sorry, truly, that Rosenberg didn’t get to experience the dick-drenched majesty and vomit-flecked travesty of a bachelorette party; no woman should be left to suffer through nearly four decades of FOMO. Alas, Rosenberg’s daughter, Alex Gilbert, wasn’t having it—Rosenberg wasn’t invited to the bachelorette party (oh god, I hate to imagine the conversation where she broke the news to mom). Gilbert knows what’s up with all of these tagalong mothers. “They want to prove they’re still young,” she tells the Times.

Ah, yes. These women have something to prove; they’re fueled by their self-insistence of their own eternal youthfulness. This desire to tag along on a raunchy night with one’s own child, to experience her life just as she does, is exactly what happens when a woman internalizes society’s message that she is only worth a damn if she’s young and dewy and carefree, things that we all supposedly cease to be the minute we spit out offspring or, worse, show signs of aging.

No matter what you believe about the role of mothers in their adult daughters’ lives, a mom’s conscious decision to “live vicariously through them” (and for hours I have been unable to shake the fact that Rosenberg said those words aloud, willingly and perfectly articulating children’s worst suspicions about over-involved parents) is the exact point at which a mom goes all Single White Female on her own child. It propels the parent-child relationship down a confusing, twisty rabbit hole—the same rabbit hole where, coincidentally, Dina Lohan, Kris Jenner, and the Real Housewives live. And as soon as there’s enough Tito’s to flood the hole, everyone drowns.

Contact the author at jessica@jezebel.com.

Image via Shutterstock.

The answer to the age-old question “What do women really want?” is finally here, at least according to Pornhub: women want lesbians, threesomes, and squirting. And if you could, say, combine all three into a lesbian threesome squirtfest, would that finally make us happy?

Pornhub’s latest insights post involves looking at the latest in search data for the ladies, with some comparison to their last look back in September 2014. According to their research, those top three search terms are still alive and kickin’. They write:

These have not changed since our first look at this female-focused kind of data, though terms like ‘massage’ and ‘teen’ have moved down the ranks, and have been replaced by terms like ‘black,’ ‘cartoon,’ and ‘lesbian scissoring’ which all now rank considerably higher. Overall, lesbian content is clearly the most popular, with terms like ‘lesbian seduces’ also ranking here, with several ebony, group and step-relative themed searches also ranking throughout.

Surely this is women being incredibly tuned into hot new trends in cartoons where black lesbians scissor. Unlike Millennials, whose porn tastes we recently covered, women are not quite so beholden to the incestuous sexual dynamics offered by step-family members. As you can see from the graph below, gangbanging, as well as extreme gangbanging, lesbian seduces, and Japanese, were all far more popular search terms.

But let’s get down to brass tacks here, in other words, pussy eating, which saw a big increase. Pornhub found that:

Overall, searches involving cunnilingus like ‘man eating pussy,’ ‘guy eating girl out,’ and ‘hardcore pussy eating’ saw increases of 589%, 353% and 228% respectively and terms involving hardcore or rough sex like ‘hard rough fuck’ and ‘fucked hard screaming’ saw growth of around 300%.

Combine this with the fact that the top two most searched categories for women are lesbian and gay (male), and you’ve got an interesting result here. Why would women, the majority of whom are hetero, be more interested in lesbian and gay porn than the wealth of straight porn out there? Maybe because straight porn still isn’t cutting it.

Those were the various theories floated last year when results found a similar trend: Women watch porn, and they watch a lot of lesbian porn. Those theories include that it’s more sensual, more readily available than so-called female-friendly porn, it’s a great way to imagine a fantasy you might have no interest in in real life (lots of women who enjoy lesbian porn say they aren’t necessarily attracted to women in reality), but everyone’s money is largely on the fact that lesbian porn is simply more female-centric than straight porn. How? It features a lot of foreplay and extended pussy eating. Crucial tit attention, fingering, and other acts which many women are, it’s safe to assume, not getting anywhere near enough of, and which hetero porn ain’t providing for long enough.

And crucially, that actual men probably aren’t providing either. Not only are women not orgasming enough, sometimes the work it takes to reach the big O simply isn’t worth it. And let’s not forget what happened when a woman declared herself done with blowjobs, and decided to let men eat her out and get her off without returning the favor. Selfish was the most polite name she was called.

Lesbian porn lets women dive into that muff a little bit more and simply enjoy an act they are deprived of far too often and may have complicated reasons for not asking for. But make no mistake: Women want their pussies eaten out. A lot. One, it feels good. Two, it may be the only way to orgasm for a lot of women (or there are also women who simply can’t orgasm at all).

And then there’s just the idea that women have a more fluid sexuality and lesbian porn for straight women is an easier bet than gay porn for straight men. This is just me jerking off a theory, but as women, we’re forced to view ourselves and other women so often through the lens of male desire. Culturally we are conditioned to see other women as objects so often, and internalize a patriarchal standard for beauty that we are free to appreciate the beauty of other women fully without feeling that it any way contradicts our desire (if we are heterosexual). And given the hetero male enthusiasm for faux-lesbian makeouts which they don’t read as rejection of them since it tends to be geared for their pleasure, it’s simply easier for heterosexual women to express attraction to women (within limits) without risking the alienation and taboo of being considered gay, due to rampant homophobia about gay men.

That said, women also are still way into gay male porn! (The third most viewed category after gay male porn is “big dick.”) As The Daily Dot theorized last year, this is for much the same reasons women like lesbian porn: There are fewer degrading acts featuring women, because there aren’t any women, i.e., “no chance of seeing some poor eastern European girl gag on a giant phallus,” and possibly it just looks like everyone in lesbian or gay male porn is having more fun.

In more boring results, Kim Kardashian is still the most searched-for porn star, and women search for James Deen way more than men. And there were some interesting demographics—the Philippines and Brazil produce 35 percent of women porn watchers, while Japan holds it steady at 17 percent.

Here’s a fun little cocktail party fact: in the U.S. specifically, Southern women watch more porn than their counterparts elsewhere. Is it because of more retrograde attitudes toward kinky sex? Boredom? Something else?

But don’t worry, women are still interested in exploring taboos. Searches for “daddy” are up by 240 percent over male users, compared to 190 percent last year. Which means we still know how to keep it dirty—and dysfunctional.

According to a concerning trend piece on the current ‘dating apocalypse’ of twentysomethings, hookup culture has hit a critical mass of excess and indulgence, and the kids are not alright—they are, in fact, all fucked out with nobody to love. RIP going steady.

The piece comes courtesy of Vanity Fair via journo Nancy Jo Sales, whose work you likely know from her piece-turned-Sofia-Coppola movie, The Bling Ring. Only this foray focuses on twentysomethings in Manhattan’s financial district, sorority girls, and visiting interns who find themselves brushing up against the erection of the New York dating scene only to find a lot of options but semi-hard dicks, no good boyfriend material, and the emotional hangover that can only come from having too much casual sex. As usual, women suffer more. What is to be done?!

Here is a primer on the new normal as presented by Sales’ subjects:

There’s Always Something Better

Some Ivy League Wall Street guy named Alex you’d probably fuck reveals that sex options these days for guys like him is just like having a reservation at some restaurant only to find out there’s an opening at Per Se. Do you know what Per Se is? It’s a fancy expensive restaurant where the average table check is $850. He intimates:

“Guys view everything as a competition,” he elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”

These Dudes Are Getting So Much Tail

100 girls a year! Somebody get this guy a Sir Fucks-a-Lot Hat.

The Girls Are Just Fuckholes

Girls he meets on Tinder are called “Tinderellas”—though there appears to be no rags to riches story for them, only his dick, which may or may not be hard enough (more on that later). And Alex and his fuck chums Dan and Marty who are also interviewed reel off the names of various conquests as if mimicking that one irritatingly catchy “Mambo No. 5” song—Brittany, Morgan, Amber. Oh, and that Russian chick. Or was she Ukrainian? Haaaah. 2busyfucking2remember.

Dudes Be Scammin’

But Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”

But Some Guys Are “Honorable” OK?

“Dude, that’s not cool,” Alex chides in his warm way. “I always make a point of disclosing I’m not looking for anything serious. I just wanna hang out, be friends, see what happens … If I were ever in a court of law I could point to the transcript.”

Here is the Zeitgeisty Part

Sex is so easy now, Sales notes, because of the Internet. Sex is like comparison shopping online. It’s super validating when someone thinks you’re hot on Tinder. It’s addictive. Nowadays you could find someone on your phone right now to fuck by midnight, says one guy. That’s just how it is, so they roll with it.

It’s “Good” for Women

Yes it is. The Freedom! The Casualness!

No it Isn’t Good for Women, You Moron

No it isn’t. It “devalues” women and “treats them like an option, not a priority,” says someone.

There’s Still a Double Standard, Dummies

#notallwomen are looking for boyfriends, though. Sales rightly argues:

Alex the Wall Streeter is overly optimistic when he assumes that every woman he sleeps with would “turn the tables” and date him seriously if she could. And yet, his assumption may be a sign of the more “sinister” thing he references, the big fish swimming underneath the ice: “For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not—they can go, ‘She’s girlfriend material, she’s hookup material.’ … There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena.”

Well, What do the Women Say?

Men have “pussy affluenza,” says smartest person in the entire piece, Amy Watanabe, a 28-year-old owner of a Sake Bar Satsko. She tells Sales that some dudes bring multiple Tinder dates in in a night are assholes.

But Are People Really Fucking This Much?

Maybe? Remember that study about how Millennials aren’t actually getting laid that much, and certainly not more than Gen-Xers? Well, that could be “open to interpretation”—the study’s authors told Sales that the results were, in part, based on “projections.”

Project This

Sales also interviews a bevy of young women trying their hand at dating in New York. They dish on the dumb stuff guys text them to hookup—”Come sit on my face” or “I want you on all fours.” They sound wary and blasé about their sex lives, as if they see how terrible it is, but have to participate in it anyway, like a Black Friday sale. You know you’re getting stampeded, but you wanted that discount skirt! Sadly, none of them talk about the thrill of the sex, or at least, it doesn’t make the final cut for the story. It’s complicated, they say, because there’s an art to hooking up. One woman tells Sales:

“It’s such a game, and you have to always be doing everything right, and if not, you risk losing whoever you’re hooking up with,” says Fallon, the soft-spoken one. By “doing everything right” she means “not texting back too soon; never double texting; liking the right amount of his stuff,” on social media.

They parse the texts they receive from men based on the time of night and their content to determine what the guy is really looking for:

“If he texts you before midnight he actually likes you as a person. If it’s after midnight, it’s just for your body,” says Amanda. It’s not, she says, that women don’t want to have sex. “Who doesn’t want to have sex? But it feels bad when they’re like, ‘See ya.’ ”

“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.

“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.

“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.

“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.

No Orgasms, Soft Dicks

Turns out it’s because the sex they are having is actually not that great. A group of sorority women at the University of Delaware dish to Sales on the real experience of all this hooking up. None of them are actually getting off with these guys, and moreover, many of the dudes, bewilderingly, can’t get it up in spite of being twentysomething men ostensibly at peak dick power. Sales explains this “curious medical phenomenon” as something that’s been blamed on processed food or possibly lack of real intimacy that pervades hookup culture.

So Men Care About Intimacy Too, Right?!

Sort of. Some of them say they might like it. Eventually. Maybe. But that their lives are perfectly fine without it. Then again, they are the ones having tons of orgasms, so.

In Conclusion

Twentysomethings have always been horny, bad at dating. This is nothing new. Sure, swiping your way to endless poon is a new development, and it’s taking shape in different ways now via rapidly changing technologies. But dating during your twenties in, say, the 90s was not a cakewalk of deep connection and intimacy, either. There were hookups, confusion, catching feelings, broken hearts, and lots of vague understandings of what relationships were, or weren’t. Then everyone grew up and settled down a little. End scene. Some of them were more or less inclined to sleep around, but lots of people do that, eventually find it to be lacking, and look for something more meaningful. No one needs a computer to be promiscuous.

One problem with this piece, aside from it’s alarmist tone, is its sample size. What about twentysomethings who live outside the urban fuck frenzy or aren’t in notoriously party-hard sororities? Another issue is that it continues to frame every sexual interaction as existing, as a friend puts it, in the shadow of “the one”—as if all any of us is doing from moment one is trying to get locked down with one person and all that experimentation on the path there is kind of sad and pathetic.

Most of us are looking for a longterm mate, eventually, but what happens before that isn’t necessarily any more fraught than it ever was, and for all its pitfalls, we tend to look back on such times fondly, and as good learning experiences. Tinder and other apps might give all of us the illusion of access to global-sized possibilities for lust or love or heartache—the current generation has certainly been given an embarrassment of riches on the potential casual sex front. But the reality is like buying 16-year-old a Porsche—most of them won’t know what to do with that kind of horsepower, anyway.

At the end of the piece, Sales speaks with a musician in his late 20s who sounds slightly worse for the hookup wear. He laments a culture where he used to have make an effort to win someone over and now interacts with “girls who will send you pictures of their pussies without even knowing your last name.”

It’s “fucking weird,” he tells her.

Perhaps, but there’s also something fascinating about generational shifts that allow people to separate out sex and pleasure from relationships so much easier than before. Getting straight to fucking—if that’s what you want—has its own anxieties, sure, but there’s something also remarkable about being more free to explore such vague spaces when you’re young, which is arguably exactly what you should be doing before pairing off anyway.

The subjects of this piece certainly don’t represent everyone. But like everyone, they will get older, slow down a little, experience some values shifts, and their brains will actually mature more. For most of us, libidos (nor alcohol tolerance) can’t rage as hard as they do in your twenties forever.

Taking the pressure off relationships for young people is one of the better things we can do for them. If anything, it’s an advantage—nothing helps you figure out more when you do want to be with someone like having been with a lot of other people you don’t want to really be with first. Why turn that into a crisis or apocalypse? After all, didn’t we used to call it playing the field—having fun?

Other older marrieds sometimes ask me the secret to having a husband who does easily half, arguably more, of the childrearing and cleaning/cooking in our house. The secret is I married someone who is 33 years old. Good news for people like me: Millennial dudes are the most engaged, involved fathers in history. Bad news: Even they are having trouble knocking this equality thing out of the park.

Writing at the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller reports on the bummer reality that millennial fathers are giving it the old college try on the raising the kids and doing the dishes front, but finding themselves screwed when it comes to workplace policies that haven’t kept pace. Miller writes:

“The majority of young men and women say they would ideally like to equally share earning and caregiving with their spouse,” said Sarah Thébaud, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But it’s pretty clear that we don’t have the kinds of policies and flexible work options that really facilitate egalitarian relationships.”

Work-family policies strongly affected women’s choices, but not men’s. Ms. Thébaud said that occurred because women disproportionately benefit from the policies since they are expected to be caregivers, while men are stigmatized for using them.

The word “benefit” here is dubious. It’s more complicated than this, because when women take advantage of these so-called favorable conditions designed precisely for them, yes, they are, in effect benefiting. But it’s not as if exercising the option doesn’t come with a penalty, it just kicks in before they ever get pregnant—in the form of being regarded as less reliable from the start, and therefore missing leadership roles or promotions due to the expectation they will start a family—and then they’re hit again afterward, when they find it difficult to re-enter the workforce after going part time. Meanwhile, men are viewed as more reliable after a family, not less.

Thébaud’s work comes from a study she co-authored on workplace policies and their effect on millennial relationships, the first such large study of its kind. But Miller cites other research that found the same thing again and again: People increasingly want and expect equal relationships, only to find that the world doesn’t seem to want to yield, in part because the nature of work has become never-ending, with everyone on the digital leash 24/7, and in part because of simply what happens when children come into the picture. One Families and Work Institute study Miller cites found that 35 percent of childless millennial men thought men and women should take on traditional roles, i.e., him the breadwinner, her the caregiver, while 53 percent of those with kids thought traditional was the best arrangement.

Here’s Miller:

“They say, ‘I didn’t realize how much of a ding it would be on my career,’” said Laura Sherbin, the center’s director of research. “It’s what women have been saying for years and years.”

The research shows that when something has to give in the work-life juggle, men and women respond differently. Women are more likely to use benefits like paid leave or flexible schedules, and in the absence of those policies, they cut back on work. Men work more.

But again, let’s note that both men and women who want equal partnerships are being penalized in some way or another for having families—women are penalized for being women, i.e., caregivers, while men are being penalized for not acting like men, i.e., breadwinners. Men will at least be rewarded through work after breeding—research shows men on average score a 6% raise per child, whereas a woman’s salary will decrease by 4 percent per child.

Other research Miller details that surveyed unmarried millennials about future work/family balance found that respondents overwhelmingly chose egalitarian arrangements (95 percent of college-educated women vs. 75 percent of college-educated men; 82 percent of women without college vs. 68 percent of men) when work policies supported them. But when they didn’t support them, things looked a little different.

64 percent of college-educated women opted for a so-called neo-traditional arrangement — the man is the primary breadwinner and the woman is the primary caregiver, though they share some of those tasks. So did 87 percent of less-educated men.

Less-educated women were more likely to choose self-reliance, or becoming the sole breadwinner. Highly educated men chose the breadwinner role and neo-traditional role in equal numbers.

Neo-traditional is a nice way of saying the woman still does more but also works.

The world is not working in our favor: We’ve got maximum idealized values. We’ve got the highest level of parental engagement ever expected. We’ve got a 24-hour work culture. And we’ve got an economic scenario that requires men and women to work full time to stay afloat.

And yet, it’s still more equal than it has ever been. Better late than never! Better something than nothing!

If all this weren’t bleak enough, here is where I will, yet again, trot out historian Stephanie Coontz’s brilliant assertion from a 2013 NYT piece about why gender equality has stalled. In it, she talks about the “values stretch” that happens when couples/families are met with such a paradox. Print it out, laminate it, tack it to the wall. Coontz writes about the toll such a values stretch can take on couples who are doing what it takes to get by and trying to put the resentment or disappointment out of their minds:

When you can’t change what’s bothering you, one typical response is to convince yourself that it doesn’t actually bother you. So couples often create a family myth about why they made these choices, why it has turned out for the best, and why they are still equal in their hearts even if they are not sharing the kind of life they first envisioned.

Heart equality is great and everything, but it’s not going to cut it. So what is to be done? Miller suggests paternity leave policies where men are rewarded for taking them might help. Reining in long hours can help men and woman alike, though it’s hard to imagine this ever shifting back. More inexpensive childcare will help reduce tensions on families everywhere. Another option is to consider that in same sex relationships, equality is sometimes better achieved when gender isn’t considered, but rather, personality and preference about who does what. And I think there is always room for couples to negotiate their own rules outside of those workplace policies as best they can.

But ultimately this comes down to changing not just attitudes, but policies and legislation at the top. Feminists have long expressed that rigid gender roles such as those outlined here fuck us all over. And what’s more, that women alone can’t enact the social change necessary to ease these burdens. We need men to get pissed. Just as pissed as we are about the way the system presumes which gender roles/values we all aspire to live by.

Of course, it takes more than just being pissed. Just like it takes more than simply wanting equality to get it. Frustrating isn’t it? Welcome to our world.

Image by Tara Jacoby.

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Other older marrieds sometimes ask me the secret to having a husband who does easily half, arguably more, of the childrearing and cleaning/cooking in our house. The secret is I married someone who is 33 years old. Good news for people like me: Millennial dudes are the most engaged, involved fathers in history. Bad news: Even they are having trouble knocking this equality thing out of the park.

Writing at the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller reports on the bummer reality that millennial fathers are giving it the old college try on the raising the kids and doing the dishes front, but finding themselves screwed when it comes to workplace policies that haven’t kept pace. Miller writes:

“The majority of young men and women say they would ideally like to equally share earning and caregiving with their spouse,” said Sarah Thébaud, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But it’s pretty clear that we don’t have the kinds of policies and flexible work options that really facilitate egalitarian relationships.”

Work-family policies strongly affected women’s choices, but not men’s. Ms. Thébaud said that occurred because women disproportionately benefit from the policies since they are expected to be caregivers, while men are stigmatized for using them.

The word “benefit” here is dubious. It’s more complicated than this, because when women take advantage of these so-called favorable conditions designed precisely for them, yes, they are, in effect benefiting. But it’s not as if exercising the option doesn’t come with a penalty, it just kicks in before they ever get pregnant—in the form of being regarded as less reliable from the start, and therefore missing leadership roles or promotions due to the expectation they will start a family—and then they’re hit again afterward, when they find it difficult to re-enter the workforce after going part time. Meanwhile, men are viewed as more reliable after a family, not less.

Thébaud’s work comes from a study she co-authored on workplace policies and their effect on millennial relationships, the first such large study of its kind. But Miller cites other research that found the same thing again and again: People increasingly want and expect equal relationships, only to find that the world doesn’t seem to want to yield, in part because the nature of work has become never-ending, with everyone on the digital leash 24/7, and in part because of simply what happens when children come into the picture. One Families and Work Institute study Miller cites found that 35 percent of childless millennial men thought men and women should take on traditional roles, i.e., him the breadwinner, her the caregiver, while 53 percent of those with kids thought traditional was the best arrangement.

Here’s Miller:

“They say, ‘I didn’t realize how much of a ding it would be on my career,’” said Laura Sherbin, the center’s director of research. “It’s what women have been saying for years and years.”

The research shows that when something has to give in the work-life juggle, men and women respond differently. Women are more likely to use benefits like paid leave or flexible schedules, and in the absence of those policies, they cut back on work. Men work more.

But again, let’s note that both men and women who want equal partnerships are being penalized in some way or another for having families—women are penalized for being women, i.e., caregivers, while men are being penalized for not acting like men, i.e., breadwinners. Men will at least be rewarded through work after breeding—research shows men on average score a 6% raise per child, whereas a woman’s salary will decrease by 4 percent per child.

Other research Miller details that surveyed unmarried millennials about future work/family balance found that respondents overwhelmingly chose egalitarian arrangements (95 percent of college-educated women vs. 75 percent of college-educated men; 82 percent of women without college vs. 68 percent of men) when work policies supported them. But when they didn’t support them, things looked a little different.

64 percent of college-educated women opted for a so-called neo-traditional arrangement — the man is the primary breadwinner and the woman is the primary caregiver, though they share some of those tasks. So did 87 percent of less-educated men.

Less-educated women were more likely to choose self-reliance, or becoming the sole breadwinner. Highly educated men chose the breadwinner role and neo-traditional role in equal numbers.

Neo-traditional is a nice way of saying the woman still does more but also works.

The world is not working in our favor: We’ve got maximum idealized values. We’ve got the highest level of parental engagement ever expected. We’ve got a 24-hour work culture. And we’ve got an economic scenario that requires men and women to work full time to stay afloat.

And yet, it’s still more equal than it has ever been. Better late than never! Better something than nothing!

If all this weren’t bleak enough, here is where I will, yet again, trot out historian Stephanie Coontz’s brilliant assertion from a 2013 NYT piece about why gender equality has stalled. In it, she talks about the “values stretch” that happens when couples/families are met with such a paradox. Print it out, laminate it, tack it to the wall. Coontz writes about the toll such a values stretch can take on couples who are doing what it takes to get by and trying to put the resentment or disappointment out of their minds:

When you can’t change what’s bothering you, one typical response is to convince yourself that it doesn’t actually bother you. So couples often create a family myth about why they made these choices, why it has turned out for the best, and why they are still equal in their hearts even if they are not sharing the kind of life they first envisioned.

Heart equality is great and everything, but it’s not going to cut it. So what is to be done? Miller suggests paternity leave policies where men are rewarded for taking them might help. Reining in long hours can help men and woman alike, though it’s hard to imagine this ever shifting back. More inexpensive childcare will help reduce tensions on families everywhere. Another option is to consider that in same sex relationships, equality is sometimes better achieved when gender isn’t considered, but rather, personality and preference about who does what. And I think there is always room for couples to negotiate their own rules outside of those workplace policies as best they can.

But ultimately this comes down to changing not just attitudes, but policies and legislation at the top. Feminists have long expressed that rigid gender roles such as those outlined here fuck us all over. And what’s more, that women alone can’t enact the social change necessary to ease these burdens. We need men to get pissed. Just as pissed as we are about the way the system presumes which gender roles/values we all aspire to live by.

Of course, it takes more than just being pissed. Just like it takes more than simply wanting equality to get it. Frustrating isn’t it? Welcome to our world.

Image by Tara Jacoby.

The success of the Channel 4 renegade-robot drama Humans — playing on AMC in the US — has gotten people talking again about what some see as the key question of our time:

Robots: How soon can we start having sex with them?

One of the more ardent cheerleaders of the coming “sexbotopia” is our old friend Heartiste, the floridly racist and woman-hating “pickup guru.” Weirdly, given his enthusiasm for the subject, he doesn’t seem all that interested in indulging in robot love himself. But he can’t stop chortling about the potential misery he thinks sexbots will cause for non-robot women.

Inspired by a recent Daily Mirror article predicting widespread human-robot sex by the year 2070, Heartiste pats himself on the back for being “the first warning about consequences from the coming sexbot revolution” — apparently he never saw The Stepford Wives — and declares that

sexbots present a real challenge to flesh and blood women and, ultimately, to the sustaining of civilization.

But Heartiste doesn’t seem terribly worried. Who needs civilization when you’ve got sexbots?

As Heartiste sees it, once the sexbots arrive the beta and omega males of the world, lacking the “game” necessary to charm manipulate attractive women into bed, will give up on real women and turn instead to sexbots. Fat chicks will be left in a sexless purgatory, and even the hottest of the HBs will have to work harder to gain the attention of alpha males, whom they will be forced to share with other women.

[I]n a sexbot saturated world, the pressure on women to look their very best for the few men left in the dating market who are still suitable mates will be immense. …

A typical American fatty with attitude to spare has no chance against a sexbot with a pretty face, a slender BMI, and a perfect hourglass shape.

A “slender BMI?” Apparently Heartiste, despite his obsession with the evils of fatness, doesn’t actually know how BMI works. I’m pretty sure robots, made mostly of metal, will end up weighing more than humans of similar shapes and sizes. So even a skinny robot will have the BMI of someone who is “morbidly obese.”

Heartiste being Heartiste, he ends his post with a racist sneer.

Prediction: The vast majority of sexbots produced for worldwide male consumption will be White women with a diverse palette of hair colors. Asian women sexbots will compete with Latin women sexbots for second place. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader which race of women will be least represented among the ranks of assembly-line sexbots. Hint: Black male sexbots will probably outsell this last category.

Heartiste’s commenters aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the coming sexbot revolution as he is.

Someone calling himself shartiste — ick — isn’t convinced that sexbots will cause flesh-and-blood women to start genuflecting to men.

[A]nyone thinking this will make girls shape up better check themselves though. The entitlement complex is ridiculous, they will just whine and continue eating. Only if alpha males start using these things will girls take notice, but if they could make a sex doll that can take a mans attention away from a flesh and blood PYT, the human race is doomed to extinction anyhow.

Jack finds talk of sexbots boring.

I’m so lazy that I will probably buy a male sexbot to fuck my female sexbot, and he can listen to her robotic nagging and her honey-do list BS.

PA points out one potential, er, obstacle to the widespread acceptance of sexbots. Hint: It’s jizz.

I remain sceptical about sexbots becoming anything more than an expensive novelty but I’ll remain open-minded on the subject IF they’re designed got hassle-free jizz-cleanup.

King, meanwhile, raises an even more skin-crawlingly icky objection:

Man engages in sex to see his will made manifest on a female body. Woman engages in sex to be the cause of his deep satisfaction, the vessel for his will. If you are fucking/getting fucked by a toaster, you may get superficial release, but it isn’t the profound satiety of causing flesh to transcend its biological strictures.

A fellow named DavidTheGnome suggests that Heartiste and the rest are;t thinking radically enough about the possibilities:

I wonder how long it would be till the truly monstrous deviants begin building giant, anthropomorphic sex dolls. Eight foot tall, mutli-wanged charivari, four armed mortal combat type sheeva outworlders and armored centaur trannies walking down main street, arm in claw with beaming human wretches.

So? If someone wants to have sex with giant Pokemon robots, who cares?

Arbiter raises a much creepier possibility, asking

If there ever would be a sexbot industry, would it be allowed to make tween bots?

Greg Eliot, meanwhile, probably speaks for many Heartiste readers when he asks

Couldn’t we just mess with the brains of real women a bit and flip a few neurons into Stepford mode?

Because that’s what these guys really want.

At its core, the budget Republicans in the state Senate passed last week is less a financial document than a manifesto, a Christmas list of conservative pipe dreams.

There are the predictable corporate and income tax cuts (though the regressive sales tax will be expanded and a tax break for nonprofits will be curtailed) and the continuation of the state's recent tradition of underfunding education. There are efforts to eliminate historic preservation tax credits and retirement benefits for some future state employees, and defund the Human Rights Commission and Office of Minority Health. There are also raw political machinations, including a $3 million-a-year cut to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Law, a rather transparent payback for employing hated legislative critic Gene Nichol.

But along with the policy grab bag—much of which won't survive negotiations with the more moderate House—there's also a more insidious undercurrent, one you don't have to look too closely to spot:

Senate Republicans really, really don't like North Carolina cities.

Or maybe it's better to say they're jealous: The Piedmont's metro counties, especially Wake and Mecklenburg, are growing and thriving and becoming economic powerhouses, even as the rural areas many Republican lawmakers represent languish in poverty. Or maybe they fear the metros' increasing—and increasingly progressive—political clout. Or maybe it's all of the above.

"I think there can be more than one explanation," says state Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, an unannounced candidate for attorney general. "There's a lot of hostility toward the million residents of Wake County in the Senate."

The highest-profile example is the Senate's plan to reallocate a portion of the state's sales-tax revenue. Right now, most of the money goes to the point of sale—in other words, the county where you bought the thing you're paying the tax on. The Senate wants to flip that formula, eventually diverting 80 percent of those funds to outlying counties—a move that would cost Wake $40 million a year once fully implemented in 2019, Durham County and its municipalities $26 million over the next four years, and Mecklenburg at least $63 million over the next five years, according to those counties' estimates and media reports.

That alone would be a devastating blow—in Wake, roughly equivalent to the property tax hike the county commission just passed to fund the county's schools. But there's more.

The Senate also wants to reconfigure the state's economic incentives program, called JDIG, to make it harder for projects in Wake, Durham and Mecklenburg—where most of the JDIG money has gone in recent years—to qualify for tax breaks.

In addition, in earlier versions of the budget, Senate Republicans wanted to renege on Medicaid funding the state had promised Wake (a $10 million annual hit) and limit Wake's ability to raise its sales tax to fund mass transit. Both of those proposals died during the amendment process.

All of that comes atop a string of earlier legislative slights to the metros, including:

• a statewide redistricting process that marginalized urban and minority voters to the benefit of rural (and conservative) whites;

• local bills that rejiggered elections for the county commission and school board in Wake as well as the Greensboro City Council, all to help Republicans get elected by increasingly blue electorates;

• attempts to strip Charlotte of control of its airport and Asheville of control of its water system, both of which have been stymied by the courts;

• the repeal of business privilege taxes, which cost the state's municipalities $62 million a year and hit big cities the hardest ($7 million a year just in Raleigh);

• the Senate's ultimately aborted effort to disrupt Raleigh's deal to purchase Dorothea Dix Park;

• and the Senate's plan, passed last week, to restrict cities' ability to create bike lanes on some state highways.

"The rural areas are firmly in [Republicans'] political control," says state Sen. Jeff Jackson, D-Mecklenburg. "With that control they are being very aggressive toward urban centers."

Sen. Harry Brown, R-Jones and Onslow, the Senate's majority leader and main budget writer, did not respond to the INDY's request for comment. But Chris Dillon, Wake's intergovernmental relations manager and the county's point person in negotiations with the General Assembly, says he doesn't think the Senate's plans are punitive.

Instead, they come from an abiding—and accurate—sense that while metro counties have prospered, rural areas have fallen evermore behind. And rural lawmakers have every reason to be frustrated.

Take tiny Scotland County, population 35,806. In April its unemployment rate was 10 percent, almost twice the statewide average. More than a third of its residents live below the poverty line, also nearly double the statewide average, according to the N.C. Budget & Tax Center.

By comparison, in April Wake had an unemployment rate of just 4.2 percent; Durham, 4.5 percent; Mecklenburg, 4.9 percent.

Throughout the state, rural counties are lagging, suffering from the loss of industries like textiles and manufacturing that aren't coming back. They've also suffered from population loss, even as the state's population has nearly doubled over the last four decades. Forty-nine of the state's rural counties are actually losing people, in some cases by as much 7 percent between just 2010 and 2014, according to Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC. Wake, meanwhile, is the seventh-fastest-growing large county in the United States, and is expected to grow by 9 percent by the end of the decade.

Brown, quoted in a press release from Senate President Phil Berger's campaign, frames the Senate's proposals in just that light: "When the current, archaic sales tax system was put in place, North Carolina was a different state. But times have changed, and the outdated distribution policy is creating a major obstacle to job creation in rural areas. These reforms strike a balance with our incentives policy and allow all of North Carolina to share in economic prosperity—by giving our rural counties a fair shake while making sure our urban centers still benefit from incentives and sales tax dollars as they grow in population."

The underlying idea is that metros are doing just fine, so it's time for them to share the wealth. And they would: Under the Senate plan, the rural counties that are home to the Senate's five highest-ranking leaders would rake in almost $160 million over the next four years, with Brown's Onslow County alone bringing in nearly $36 million, according to a report last week in the Herald-Sun.

Guillory, who served on the Rural Prosperity Task Force convened by Gov. Jim Hunt in the 1990s, says the goal of improving rural economies is laudable. But taking the pine to metro counties may not be the best way to get there.

In April, when the Senate rolled out its sales tax plan, Guillory penned an article in EdNC that argued, in essence, that urbanization is the future and lawmakers better get used to it. "For the foreseeable future," he wrote, "North Carolina will depend on its major metros for its overall economic vitality. To shift tax revenue from urban to rural may end up hurting both urban and rural. ... Mecklenburg and Wake each have more than one million residents, and have emerged as such powerful economic engines that the state would suffer if these metro economies suffer."

(Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican from Charlotte, made a similar argument to the Herald-Sun: The sales-tax redistribution "will have a major negative impact on economic centers across the state.")

A better approach, Guillory says, is to focus on rural education—as he points out, there's nothing in the Senate's redistribution plan that guarantees that those new revenues would go to schools—and linking rural residents to urban job markets, even if that means they leave their hometowns for greener pastures.

"It is simply the right thing for North Carolina to do to give its rural young people the intellectual and social skills to become upwardly mobile and to exercise real choice in pursuing a career and deciding where to live," Guillory wrote.

Besides, it's not like the fast-growing metros don't have their own needs: transportation, affordable housing, water supplies, schools—not to mention their own pockets of poverty. In fact, according to the Durham-based nonprofit MDC's State of the South report last year, the Raleigh and Charlotte areas each experienced a 90 percent increase in people living in poverty between 2000 and 2012. Raleigh ranks at the bottom for income inequality among Southern cities, and both Raleigh and Charlotte rank low in income mobility.

"I understand the rural counties are having issues," Dillon says. "Wake County has 110,000 people living in poverty right now. If that was a county, [that population would be] the 26th-largest county in the state right now."

As lawmakers focus on rural development, Guillory told the INDY last week, they need to remember something: The past is gone.

"It's important that our policymakers understand what North Carolina has become and come to terms with the real North Carolina," Guillory says, "not the North Carolina of nostalgia and memory."

“Hey, you know what you should try? Ordering off the SECRET MENU, bro. Like, ask for a McChicken, but instead of the chicken, get them to put, like, a McFlurry on there! #lifehack #yolo #iamlungcancerinhumanform”

Regular readers will know that there are many, many things that make me angry: classism, Yelp, whichever jackass submitted “truffle fries” to Lays as part of their yearly contest, tomatoes.* Perhaps none of them make me angrier, however, than the entire concept of fast food “secret menus” and the people who worship at their altar.

Sites dedicated to deciphering secret menus are bad enough—that goes without saying—but posts about secret menu items and “fast food hacks” (god, I hate myself for even typing that) have become sickeningly popular lately. These exercises in self-congratulation are everywhere. Excited posts abound about how the Secret Menu really does exist (!!!!!!!!!!!), reporting the news as if imparting some grand magisterial wisdom. Spice up your trip to Taco Bell—a restaurant which features the exact same five ingredients slammed together in roughly 40 different configurations—by inventing a burrito, but, like, made out of nachos, man. Or ask for a quesadilla at Chik-Fil-A, which I’m reasonably sure would result in fellow customers wearing Scott Walker campaign t-shirts asking you if you’re “one o’ them dirty illegal rapists what we should be keepin’ out with a border fence.”

Everything about these posts are terrible, but more than anything, it’s the self-important tone that turns something otherwise generally innocuous if a bit dumb into something far more groan-inducing. I can’t believe I have to actually clarify this, but we need to stop pretending the discovery of new ways to smoosh cheeseburgers together—and the breathless, orgiastic reporting of said discoveries—makes us akin to Edmund fucking Hilary. We are none of us intrepid explorers journeying to the dark, unforgiving summit of a culinary Everest; we’re just hungry motherfuckers who were stoned/bored/suicidally stupid enough to think “hey, what’d happen if they made a Big Mac out of Apple Pies?”

Mea culpa: I did once write a post about the McGangbang in which I did not, unaccountably, shit all over the idea of Secret Menu posts. In my defense, I had only been doing this job for a month at that point, and I was young and stupid. Unfortunately for my readers, time only cures one of those ills.

Getting back to the matter at hand, though, the crucial point is this: there is no such thing as a “secret menu.” They do not exist as people wish to understand them. The entire concept is a falsehood perpetrated by idiots drunk on some warped thrill of discovery. Even the Reddit post supposedly confirming the existence of McDonalds’ secret menu that had food websites collectively losing their shit recently does no such thing. In response to a question about “can you confirm the Secret Menu exists,” a McDonald’s manager said:

You can order from the ‘Secret Menu’. Just like with any of our sandwiches, you can add, remove or change ingredients by special request. These are called ‘grill orders’ (i.e. Big Mac no pickle)

The items on the ‘secret menu’ weren’t invented by anyone officially at McDonald’s, it’s just a random persons guide to burgers you could potentially ‘hack’ at McDonald’s.

Order one and the workers might not know it by name (i.e. Land, Air and Sea burger or the McGangBang) but if you explain what it is, and are willing to pay for all the ingredients, it’s just another ‘grill order’ that we can make up.

Unfortunately, apparently every person who read this stopped at “HE SAID YOU CAN ORDER FROM THE SECRET MENU OMG SECRET MENUS ARE REAL JESUS HAS RISEN MCGANGBANGS FOR ALL” and missed the rest of the quote, where he goes on to say, “I mean, sure, it technically exists in that the things you guys claim are on it can be made by human hands if you ask for them specifically.”

In other words, they can do special orders. That’s it. There’s no secret menu. There are special orders where they throw ingredients together in unusual ways after being forced to by customers, probably after fantasizing about holding said customer’s head in the deep fryer. This isn’t news; this is how fast food restaurants have operated since their inception. None of you are unearthing some grand secrets the wise McElders hid from human sight, that only the worthy might one day discover them. You’re just throwing shit at the wall and calling yourself special for it.

Ordering off the secret menu is also a dick move in the same vein as inventing your own items at a sit-down restaurant. At a sit-down restaurant, this might maybe be tolerable if it’s slow and you’re a regular, favored customer who tips unreasonably well and if you’re extremely polite about it, but there’s a special place in hell reserved for any manager who coddles idiot rando customers who invent their own menu items during rushes.

The problem with this as it applies to fast food is that corporate culture is such that managers live in terror of telling a customer no—even for a good reason—because it’s their ass on the line when that dipshit customer calls or emails corporate that the very rude** manager refused to accommodate their extremely reasonable*** request that they cook the french fries only on one side, then season them in unicorn tears, then cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. What’s worse, usually the company, terrified by the spectre of bad PR, will kowtow and concede that yes, it was inexcusable that the mean old manager wasn’t willing to face the terror of Shelob for the sake of her McGreaseFucker Value Meal, and they should be fired right away!

Bottom line: the secret menu doesn’t exist, and even if it did, don’t order off the secret menu. Don’t be an ass. If you don’t like what an eatery is serving, go somewhere else. If nowhere appears to be serving it, learn to cook and make it at home. Just, for the love of God, stop inflicting your own sense of self-importance and desperate, all-consuming need to feel special on food service workers. And if you’re a writer considering whether to make a post on secret menus, there’s one important question to ask yourself: does your URL read Clickhole.com? No? Then maybe you should just not.

* Some of you might be wondering why Guy Fieri is not on this list. Simple: Guy Fieri does not make me angry. I love Guy Fieri, unironically and unabashedly. He is insane and terrible, yes, but the important thing is that he is wildly entertaining in the process and gives me plenty of story fodder. I never, ever want Guy Fieri to go away, ever.

** Extremely polite.

*** Batshit fucking loco.

Image via FocusDzign/Shutterstock.