It comes out of Rogerian theory (attributed to the American humanist psychologist Carl Rogers), and it refers to relying on other people's opinions rather than trusting your own experience (which would be termed “internal locus of evaluation”).

Please note that this is a different concept than the “internal vs. external locus of control” that you learned about in “Introduction to General Psychology” or some equivalent undergraduate course. That concept refers to the fact that “people with an internal locus of control believe their own actions drive their outcomes. Those with an external locus of control attribute outcomes to luck, fate, or other people instead.”

External vs. internal locus of evaluation is an entirely different concept, and it’s fallen so out of current discourses that it’s nearly impossible to adequately research online. This site, while not technically scholarly, does a decent job, and this journal article also touches on it. The original source is Rogers’ 1951 book titled Client-centered Therapy, Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory, which is unfortunately not digitized.

I’m going to break it down for you, though, at least in terms of its relevance to dating (Rogers applies it differently than I’m going to, as his focus was therapeutic; as always, my focus is pragmatic; I want to protect women).

Here’s why the external locus of evaluation is crucial to dating, especially if you’re meeting men on dating apps:

When you match with someone online, you are meeting him in a social vacuum. In one interpretation, this might seem “pure,” like it’s an opportunity to get to know someone on a blank slate, but I think this is actually really dangerous in a dating scenario. Nobody who’s reached the age of adulthood exists in a vacuum or on a blank slate, and what you cannot see actually matters a lot.

It’s impossible to get an accurate interpretation of who someone is outside of the context of his life. You NEED to see how he interacts with family and friends, with co-workers, with his children, etc. You need to know if he’s a responsible son/father/brother/ex-husband; you need to know if he’s an honest employee; you need to know if pets and small children and elderly people feel safe in his presence.

In the absence of context, anyone can “curate” a personality for themselves, and there’s no concrete artifacts against which to judge the authenticity of that personality. Which means someone could waste a LOT of your time and/or suck you into a dangerous situation if he’s permitted to maintain a context-less, curated personality over an extended period of time.

Very early on, people are hesitant to bring new dating partners into their social, familial, and professional circles; this makes sense and is appropriate. If, however, you’ve been dating someone exclusively for a few weeks or more and he still hasn’t brought you into those circles—and I mean “brought you into those circles” in substantial and significant ways—I would be worried, and I would be backpedaling.

Here’s the argument for availing yourself of the “external locus of evaluation”:

It’s just a lot more likely to be accurate. It’s not that your judgement is inferior in any way, it’s just that you lack both the breadth and depth of experience with this person required to arrive at an accurate conclusion.

In this case, it’s true that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The collective opinion of a bunch of people across disparate domains of life and across spans of time is always going to be more accurate than the opinion of one person over a short period of time (which, at the point we’re discussing, is you).

I think of this the same way I think of teaching evaluations (I’ve been in university administration a long time, so I’ve read thousands of these at this point): One bad evaluation of a professor means nothing—it means the student got a bad grade and is mad or something. However, if students from multiple classes across years of teaching and various institutions ALL seem to have the same negative opinion of a professor, it tends to be spot on (and vice versa; this works the same way in the positive: if across the boards students say, “He’s fair, he’s kind, he’s trustworthy, he’s smart,” then he is probably all of those things. There’s no other way to explain it)1.

I realize that, in some ways, what I’m writing right now flies in the face of “trusting your gut” or relying upon women’s intuition, two things I’m constantly championing in Burned Haystack discourses. I’m not departing from that stance now, I’m just saying it’ll still benefit you to put a man in a larger context.

I’d even go so far as to slice my advice two different ways according to orientation, and it would look like this:

1. If you have a BAD feeling about a man, trust it—get away from him. You don’t need anyone else’s evaluation.

2. But if you have a GOOD feeling about a man, seek validation and verification. If you’re correct, you’re going to get the affirmation you want, and you’ll feel even more hopeful and confident.

The sad truth is that certain personality types—the most dangerous ones—are often capable of pulling the wool over people’s eyes IN ISOLATION, but they can almost never do it with the masses across space and time.

The other (perhaps obvious) reason to be concerned about a man who’s trying to contain you in a vacuum is that he may by hiding the fact that he’s already in another relationship (or multiple relationships).

I want to respond in advance to an objection I know will be raised, and it sounds like this:

“I never introduce men to my family and friends until several months into a relationship because I have young children, and this is a way that I protect them.”

That’s fine. That makes sense, and it’s smart. That doesn’t mean HE should not be introducing YOU. Statistically speaking, you are not a danger to any man you meet on a dating app. Statistically speaking, he IS a danger to you AND to your children, which is why you DO definitely want to verify and get a glimpse through a much larger scope on him than he needs to on you. This is just how things are. 🤷‍♀️ I wish we all lived on an even playing field, but we do not.

And finally, here’s the Burned Haystack heuristic:

If you’ve been dating someone for a few weeks or so, and especially if you’re dating him exclusively, he should be voluntarily and proactively welcoming you into the other circles of his life. If he’s not, I feel confident saying there’s perhaps something seriously wrong.

If this is your situation, you could say something like this: “Things between us seem to be going really well, and I’d love to introduce you to my family and friends” or something like that. If he seems pleased and genuinely excited and then reciprocates, then there’s probably no problem; perhaps he just didn’t want to rush things or he wanted to give you time to be comfortable.

If he has any kind of negative or cagey or sketchy response AT ALL, I would call it. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a sociopath or a cheater, he might just be strongly avoidant, but if he’s that strongly avoidant and you are looking for a long-term monogamous partner, it’s not going to work out anyway (I’m not making a value judgement about the humanity or goodness of those who are avoidantly attached; I’m just saying that all available research suggests you’d be signing up for a world of hurt if you attempt to force someone with this attachment style into a structure with which they’re uncomfortable).

If he’s kind but just keeps insisting he “needs more time” or “wants to see where things go” or especially if he pretends that YOU are a threat to him (there’s a lot of this right now — men on the apps pretending their safety is threatened by women 🙄), I would be very concerned about that. If it were me, I would end things.

Curious to hear about other experiences with this kind of thing . . .

Belle Burden’s memoir, which opens with her husband suddenly leaving her and their three children at the beginning of the pandemic, invokes the oft-asked question, “Were there red flags? Did I miss them?” Burden refers to “the subtle or not subtle warnings I should have seen before we married, the ones people ask me about now, wanting something—anything—to prove that our fate could have been predicted” (p. 58).

She goes on to say, “There is nothing I look back on now and say, How could I have missed that?” (p. 59)

There was something, though. There were a few things, and they were clear and reliably predictive. I’m sure they seemed meaningless at the time, but viewed through a rhetorical lens, they light up like neon.

I’m not claiming that these clues would have revealed exactly what would happen; however, I am saying that the toxic vapor was already up there, coalescing into marital storm clouds that would take decades to rain down.

Moreover, with the right set of analytical skills, the danger would have been discernible by Ms. Burden before she married a man who would wreak so much havoc in her life.

Three disclaimers before we analyze Ms. Burden’s husband’s early red flag clues:

1. Though I am claiming her hardship was preventable, I am definitely not saying Ms. Burden should have prevented it, nor am I assuming she’d even want to. Her book concludes more “elegiac” than “regret narrative,” and I doubt she would want to click undo on her children or the significant years of happy history she experienced with her husband.

2. I am definitely not blaming her for anything that happened, nor am I claiming that she should have seen this coming. The whole reason Burned Haystack as a method was developed is that I didn’t see so many red flags in my own life, and the reason it’s caught fire as a method is that most women don’t. Women have always been socialized to look the other way, to tolerate, to endure, to excuse, to forgive, and to suffer. Of course we played into these social scripts; that’s how social scripts work.

3. This is not a book review or any kind of assessment of the writing. This is a rhetorical analysis, not a judgment. In academic literary terms, it is a reading of one text, Strangers, through a particular theoretical lens (Burned Haystack method).

There are 33 official “red flag rhetorical patterns” in Burned Haystack Dating Method. In this article, we’re going to focus on the disciplinary/directive rhetorical pattern because that is the pattern that Ms. Burden’s ex-husband displayed very early on in their relationship; it’s one of the most toxic rhetorical patterns in Burned Haystack methodology, and unfortunately the most common.

Here are examples of it taken directly from Strangers.

• Three weeks into their romance, he said, “Tell me you love me” (p. 53).

  
  This is not romantic, or cute, or “gutsy”; this is the disciplinary/directive rhetorical pattern, and it’s toxic. We see disciplinary/directive pattern when men assume authority over women.
  
  It manifests thematically, as in the example above—he is literally ordering her to say or do something—but it also manifests grammatically, and that’s harder to discern.
  
  Let me explain: men who write messages such as “Let’s grab coffee and see where this goes!” as opposed to “Would you be interested in meeting for coffee?” are also displaying disciplinary/directive rhetorical pattern. This might seem like splitting hairs, the two examples I just gave, but I am telling you that what feels like a minute difference at the lowkey end of that pattern— “Let’s” versus “Would you be interested?” tends to magnify over time, frequently blooming into dynamics that meet the clinical definitions of coercive control and domestic abuse; that is why there are so many therapists who employ rhetorical patterning in their work.
  
  In Burned Haystack methodology, the disciplinary/directive pattern seems to be the most predictive of abusive potential. Women report over and over again that, regardless of the level at which it presents early on, this pattern predicts significant harm down the line. Ms. Burden’s former husband exhibited the pattern at week three.
  

• Before three months had passed, he told her “We’re going to get married. We’re going to have a family together” (54).
  

• On their honeymoon, when Ms. Burden paid the tab (with her own money) on an expensive meal without noting the itemized breakdown, he “told me this would not be the way we did things in our marriage. I was surprised by his upset, by his scolding” (p. 64).
  
  While my first two examples could be confused with rom-com antics—casual misogyny disguised as romance, the honeymoon interaction clearly takes a darker turn.
  

• Throughout the early years of their marriage, she notes that “He asked me often, ‘I make you so happy, right?’”
  
  This reads more like a statement, a telling, than a question—we could almost drop the “right?” and it would be essentially the same: “I make you so happy.” There’s a difference between asking someone how she feels and directing her under the guise of wanting affirmation; this is an example of the latter.
  

• When Ms. Burden was offered a job at a large non-profit, a job she wanted to seriously consider, her husband said, “You can’t do that. You need to be here for the kids.” She notes that “the speed of his response, the lack of discussion, was startling” (p. 75). This interaction is also difficult to dismiss: Burden is a Harvard-educated attorney who received multiple offers from top New York law firms, one of which she was employed by when she met her husband; it’s certainly understandable that she may have wanted to continue to pursue her own career.
  

Taking all these examples together, we see a strong and sustained disciplinary/directive pattern in Burden’s husband’s words. Over time, we see him assume authoritative control over her feelings, her actions, her career choices, and her finances. This is what always happens with the disciplinary/directive pattern: it starts at such a lowkey register that it’s easy to miss, but over time it becomes entrenched and nefarious.

In addition to what I’ve noted above, Burden’s husband frequently exhibits behavior that could be described as anti-social; appearing cold, calculating, emotionless, and devoid of empathy or the capability to feel regret. He spends money excessively and cleaves to extreme patriarchal structures; he is sometimes cruel and appears to romanticize his “bad boy” youth. Mental health professionals could address these psychological complexities in a way that I cannot, but as far as the kind of partner he’d turn out to be, the rhetorical tells were there from the start.

Burden notes throughout the book that she had been brought up to cover for men, to silently tolerate their abuse, to eclipse her own dreams in order to support her husband’s. These lessons are extraordinarily destructive to women, and they are currently being resurrected and re-packaged in movements such as #tradwife and in more red-pilled, Manosphere-driven podcasts than I want to count.

I want my work to serve as an antidote to it---to the toxic patriarchal structures of couplehood to which Burden and my other Gen X sisters were raised to conform. Rhetorical analysis is the one tool I’ve got with which to dismantle these misogynistic structures, and if there’s an indictment in this article it is of those destructive norms, not of Burden’s or any individual woman’s choices. Her memoir is a modern-day cautionary tale, and in the case of this analysis it is also a shining rhetorical artifact of the predictive power of words alone.

The Morning Bell, by Winslow Homer, 1872

The ethos of Burned Haystack is partially rooted in the theory of American Pragmatism, which is a philosophy established in the 1870s by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

I did not go on and on about it in my book (even though I wanted to, but even I [sometimes] have the sense to know when to cool it with the theory), though I do briefly touch on it twice in the text.

It’s always been there, though, at the foundation of Burned Haystack. I became obsessed with William James sometime in the early 2000s, I can’t remember why, and I’ve been keeping this list of quotes from his Essays in Pragmatism to inform and guide my analyses and decision-making ever since.

If you want to learn more about Pragmatism, I suggest reading the book linked above; if you want a quick background on William James, it’s right here.

You might now be wondering: Why is she posting this on Substack, and what am I supposed to do with it?

To answer the former: I mentioned it briefly in a discussion in the Facebook group this morning, and a few community members said they actually would like to know more about Pragmatism, so I’m answering that call.

To respond to the latter: I’m honestly not sure what you might do with it, but here’s one idea:

If you’re trying to figure out something thorny, I think some of these quotes might be helpful, but probably not out of context. The whole thing about Pragmatism is that, for a philosophy—a discipline generally grounded in abstractions—it’s highly concrete and rooted in the real world—in people’s lived realities. That’s why it works so well for Burned Haystack and why I’ve said a million times in various places (this is going to go in BIG TEXT):

This method is not moralistic or ideological; it’s pragmatic. When it comes to helping women navigate dating, I don’t really care about abstractions such as “Capital T Truth” or “Doing the Right Thing.” A lot of women get hurt and killed in the name of such things. I just care about helping women stay smart and safe and comfortable and happy.

So anyway, I believe if you have a concrete problem you are trying to solve or a complex dilemma you are trying to parse for clear comprehension, some of these quotes might be useful to you, though I have no idea how since I don’t know your situation.

Let me give you one Burned Haystack-relevant example, though:

Imagine that you’ve had a string of problematic-to-toxic relationships, you’ve been deceived, you’ve been thriving and/or surviving on relational chaos, you’ve been gaslighted until you can’t tell what’s real, and you’ve been generally stuck on an exhilarating-yet-horrifying rollercoaster of a romantic life. And then maybe you take a big break and go to therapy and read a bunch of relationship books and join a Burned Haystack community and give it another go. And then you meet someone and he seems . . . great??? But you can’t tell if there’s . . . chemistry??? And your one friend is saying, “You deserve fireworks, you deserve The World, DO NOT SETTLE FOR ANYTHING LESS THAN EVERYTHING” and your other friend is saying, “I love him. He seems so kind. How do you not love this guy?” And you have truly no idea what to do because you agree with both your friends. Well, maybe you pull up a list of quotes from your old friend William James and selected by Yours Truly 😃 (this is not an AI-generated list; I curated this one myself after poring over every word of every essay), and you happen upon this passage (I’m simply taking the first one from my list below):

"What then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.”

And you think, Huh. I actually DO have a feeling of ease and peace and rest. And for once I’m NOT puzzled and perplexed; this guy is clear and transparent and never keeps me wondering or second guessing or doubting every word I say or move I make. It doesn’t necessarily always feel exciting, but it does feel . . . comforting and rational. Like, it makes sense in my life. What if William James is right and, rather than being about intensity and chemistry, it’s “rational comprehension” that’s “full of lively relief and pleasure.” Because it actually is pretty great to just feel calm and peaceful and solid for once in my life. I have time and energy to channel into my family and friends as well as my relationship, and I’m getting a lot more done in terms of things I actually care about. This might be the best thing ever.

That’s how you might use these quotes. Anyway, for what it’s worth, here they are, in page-numbered order from whatever edition of that collection I read 20 years ago, and I’m sorry that I don’t recall which edition it was. 😬

Regardless, I hope they might bring you clarity or at least some mental intrigue the way they have for me over the years. The bolded text is the individual essay title, all of which are contained in the book linked above.

From “The Sentiment of Rationality”

What then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure. 3

Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound into melodic or harmonic order. 4

[T]here is one particular relation of greater practical importance than all the rest—I mean the relation of a thing to its future consequences. 13

I therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a philosophic conception must satisfy: It must, in a general way at least, banish uncertainty from the future. 13

[W]hen the future is neutral and perfectly certain, “we do not mind it,” as we say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. . . . But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs; we do not know what will come next; and novelty per se becomes a mental irritant, while custom per se is a mental sedative, merely because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations. 13-14

It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests. 18

But nature has put into our hands two keys, by which we may test the lock. If we try the moral key and it fits, it is a moral lock. If we try the unmoral key and it fits, it is an unmoral lock. 35

The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from orthodoxy by too sharp a line. 36

From “The Dilemma of Determinism”

Not the saint, but the sinner that repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth and height and depth, of life’s meaning is revealed. Not the absence of vice, but vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human state. 54

From “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”

The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc.—are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. 67

The best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be the capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break down fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses that never aim at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most universal principle—that the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand. 77

The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. 78

So that the ethical philosopher’s demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. 78

Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher’s task by the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely ordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. The philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard. He is confident, and rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fullness of the truth. 78-9

The very best of men must be not only insensible, but be ludicrously and peculiarly insensible, to many goods. 79

Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? That act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed. 80

Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands—that and that only is the path of peace! 80

These experiments are to be judged, not a priori, but by the actual finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry or how much appeasement comes about. 82

The pure philosopher can only follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the kingdom of heaven is incessantly made. 82

Every now and then, however, some one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old “laws of nature” by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than would have followed had the rules been kept. 82

In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no non-moral goods; and the highest ethical life—however few may be called to bear its burdens—consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case. There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. 83

He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole. But which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the wounded will soon inform him of the fact. 83

We call the tyrannical demands imperatives. If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it. The good which we have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets. Obligation can thus exist inside a single thinker’s consciousness; and perfect peace can abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top. It is the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals. Nothing shall avail when weighed in the balance against them. They call out all the mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf. 84

From “What Pragmatism Means”

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. 142

The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. 142

Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. 142

I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital belief. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. 156

From “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?

The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. 160

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its very-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation. 161

Okay, first, some background info you need:

Although the (intentionally manipulative) image above clearly suggests that Benjamin J. Harvey is contemplating becoming a male menopause coach (🙄), what he’s actually up to is far worse.

I did all the research before I wrote the first piece, and I’m glad I did because Mr. Harvey’s organization has now taken a lot of stuff down off the internet, probably because so many of you messaged him at the link I provided in the first piece (Nice Work! 🔥).

If you try to click through to the rest of the promotional materials right now, you just get this:

But two days ago, you could click through to a video that featured a large number of menopausal-and-older women milling about a seminar room getting ready to attend their “free” workshop (and I’m sure the workshop was free; that’s how these things work).

The workshop, I assume, would be Mr. Harvey’s pitch to these women about how he could coach them (for a fee) to coach other women (for more fees) about how to survive menopause.

This is a lot more nefarious than him just deciding to become a menopause coach. If he were simply doing that on his own, he’d have to learn something about menopause, but that’s not what he’s doing.

He makes WAY more money on women this way than he would if he were an individual menopause coach because “coaching the coaches” creates a compounding profit (for him).

So he’s not just exploiting and profiting from women’s suffering; he’s figured out a way to get women to not only perform all the labor but to fund their own exploitation while he monetizes their lived experience.

This is the grift.

Anyway, last night I received this email (text pasted below for readability):

Subject: Sorry

Message: Hi Jennie, I’m Quynh, the Marketing Manager at Authentic Education and I work closely with Benjamin J Harvey.

I came across your article about our menopause coaching ad and wanted to reach out to you personally.

I’m genuinely sorry for how we handled this campaign and for the impression it gave. I can understand why the ad was upsetting and why it raised concerns about men speaking into an experience that they cannot personally understand.

We’ve since stopped the ad, and I’ve taken the feedback back to our team to review both the messaging and how we handle criticism going forward.

I simply wanted to personally acknowledge the concerns you raised, and let you know that we are taking the feedback seriously.

Thank you for taking the time to speak up about it.

I just emailed her back. Here is my response (text pasted below for readability):

Hi Quynh,

Thank you for the email, but why are you apologizing to me? I haven’t been harmed by this. I’m a humor writer—that ad was candy to me. I almost felt bad that Benjamin J. Harvey made my job so easy.

(I also don’t love that he’s having a woman do his apologizing, though I guess this tracks with his general M.O.)

In any case, there seems to be a major misunderstanding of the problem here:

The problem is not that “the ad was upsetting” and that it “raised concerns about men speaking into an experience they cannot personally understand.”

This is the actual problem:

Benjamin J. Harvey is recruiting women who have endured or are enduring a health condition that is uncomfortable, debilitating, and frequently financially destructive. He’s then co-opting that pain and suffering, “coaching” these women about how to package their own lived experience, and leveraging all of it to his own profit.

So that’s the problem, not that I was “upset by the messaging.” That’s an absurd way to contextualize what’s happening.

That’s like uncovering a Ponzi scheme that robs elderly people of their life savings and saying, “Wow, this is really bad, someone needs to do a better job on the messaging of this Ponzi scheme.”

No, the Ponzi scheme itself is the problem; someone needs to shut down the scam.

Which I assume Benjamin won’t do; I assume he’ll somehow find a way to make this, too, work to his favor because that’s what men like him do, and he’s obviously been very successful doing it. He’s getting me to “do the work” for him right now by explaining everything that’s wrong with this business plan, and I’m doing it for free on my actually-free platform (because I’m going to publish this email).

I’m happy to help, though (not Benjamin, but other women), since this is all giving me an opportunity to talk about how a savvy application of feminist rhetoric can render women more empowered to steer clear of conmen like your boss.

Benjamin directing you to send me this email in which he ostensibly empathizes with how “upset” I am is called a “red herring” in rhetoric. It’s a distraction from the actual problem, intentionally inserted to get everyone onto a different problem so that we won’t focus on the original problem, which is that Benjamin J. Harvey is profiting off female pain.

It’s also sometimes called a “thought-terminating cliche,” in this case meaning that if we can re-cast the problem as “a bunch of women having their feelings hurt by a Facebook ad,” then we’re all of a sudden talking about women’s hurt feelings and a man doing something to make us feel better rather than the actual problem, which is again that Benjamin J. Harvey is a swindler and his “Authentic Education” program is the very definition of “inauthentic” (what I’m doing right now is termed “amplification”; I’m repeating the truth in a way that amplifies it so as to prevent Benjamin J. Harvey from introducing yet another spin; “Amplification” is a rhetorical tactic that is highly effective in reclaiming the words of a narcissist and returning everyone to what’s actually happening in reality, which, again, is that your boss is a grifter).

Anyway, I appreciate the email apology, but I don’t think anyone who read my piece is really struggling with being upset (did you read the comments? Everyone seemed super entertained and cracked up by Benjamin J. Harvey’s nonsense).

Sincerely,

Jennie Young

These are my favorite books—to read and to teach❤️📚 In case you would like recommendations 🥰

• I plan to update this regularly, but it won’t generate a new email every time I do; if you want my most updated list, please click “save” and check back regularly 😊

• This is offered in no order whatsoever, no ranking; just however I found my titles—on my shelves, in the Libby app, and in my Kindle library. 📚

FEMINIST LIT (mostly taken from a course I teach that I call “Gritty Chick Lit,” which means highly readable but also super smart and literary, and frequently humorous; I am a book snob, so no fluffy beach reads on this list)

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

The House of My Mother, by Shari Franke

The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews (would be interesting to pair this reading with Plato’s Dialogues)

Isola, by Allegra Goodman

Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

Wordslut, by Amanda Montel

The Roundhouse, by Louise Erdrich

The Mad Wife, by Meagan Church

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Elinor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman

Station Eleven or LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE, by Emily St. John Mandel

The Rapture of Canaan, by Sheri Reynolds

The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner

The Push, by Ashley Audrain

Self Care, by Leigh Stein

Young Jane Young, by Gabrielle Zevin

Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid

The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings

Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi

The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi

Dear Senthuran, by Akwaeke Emezi

God Spare the Girls, by Kelsey McKinney

Candy Girl, by Diablo Cody

Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

Luster, by Raven Leilani

The Pisces, or Milkfed, by Melissa Broder

The First Bad Man, by Miranda July

The Power, by Naomi Alderman

The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty

My Murder, by Katie Williams

AUTHORS WHOSE BOOKS I READ NO MATTER WHAT (if their name is on this list that means I’m recommending everything they’ve written)

Ekwaeke Emezi

David Sedaris

Chelsea Handler

Richard Russo

Elizabeth Strout

Dave Eggers

Kent Haruf

Emily St. John Mandel

Gillian Flynn

Louise Erdrich

Jon Krakauer

Miriam Toews

OTHER RANDOM BOOKS I ENJOYED

The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey

Normal People, by Sally Rooney

Lost Lambs, by Madeline Cash

The Talking Bone, by Rene Denfeld

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett

The Berry Pickers, by Amanda Peters

The Colony, by Annika Norlin

Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan

This is How, by Augusten Burroughs

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

Cultish, by Amanda Montell

Shrill, by Lindy West

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang

Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy

Death Valley, by Melissa Broder

The Mighty Red, by Louise Erdrich

Future Home of the Living God, by Louise Erdrich

To the Bright Edge of the World, by Eowyn Ivey

Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks

Educated, by Tara Westover

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhoda Janzen

Miss Jane, by Brad Watson

My Own Country, Abraham Verghese

A Truce that is Not Peace, Miriam Toews

You might wonder, “Does Jennie Young have the relevant education, expertise, and experience required to professionally coach men who play professional football?” Of course I do. I have a doctorate in feminist applied rhetoric.

And more importantly, I get it. I get YOU, you men out there who want to kick and throw the pointy ball. I don’t need to have thrown or caught or kicked or held a football myself to understand its draw, it’s life-altering power, or its brutal challenges. You might wonder whether I’m able to empathize with the hardships that heavily-padded, overpaid men endure on a daily basis, but I can. And I do.

I’m an empath.

I don’t need to have any particular certification to imagine the frustration that would rear its ugly head if all I wanted to do was throw the pointy ball to my friend and then my friend didn’t catch it. And then maybe all the other friends get mad at BOTH of us. That sounds terrible. Playing the football game is nuanced, and complex, and multi-layered, I assume, and that’s why I’ve decided to become a professional coach of professional football players.

And just like Benjamin J. Harvey, Professional Menopause Coach of Menopausal Women, is qualified in his new venture that I assume must have occurred to him while he was drinking some sort of protein-and-cocaine-infused smoothie, I am clearly the best person to advise football men.

I realize that because I am a petite, middle-aged lady who has never played any sport whatsoever, you might assume that I’m not qualified to teach men how to tackle and to fight the other players. That’s where you’re wrong: I feel violent most of the time these days. Knocking down large, testosterone-fueled men is actually one of my number one fantasies. I’ve been manifesting it, and in the coaching world, “manifesting” is synonymous with “doing,” with “mastery.”

Some topics I will cover with my footballing clients:

• How to empower people to live abundantly on purpose. This is better than disempowering people to starve chaotically.
  

• What to do on the days when you can’t decide whether to throw the pointy ball or run across the grass with the pointy ball. People assume there’s some sort of strategy for this, some sort of method or philosophy, but there’s not. Or at least there hasn’t been, until now. My professional coaching for professional footballing will make everything clear in the downloadable PDF you’ll receive when you sign up for my online seminar called “All About Footballing and Running and Throwing and Kicking the Pointy Ball Over the White Bar Thing, Presented by Jennie Young, Ph. D., Feminist Rhetorician.”
  

• The 3 signs you’re sabotaging your success: Probably the #1 sign is that you’re just wearing the wrong shoes. This isn’t rocket science, so let’s not overthink it. Maybe your shoes don’t have the spiky spikes on the bottom of them and that’s why it’s so hard to run very quickly while also carrying the pointy ball. See? Simple. I’ll reveal the other two signs during the seminar, after I figure out what they are.

As a REAL menopausal woman, I understand full well how hard it is to focus when your hormones are all out of whack from their natural state. I, too, purchase hormones from questionable places on the internet these days, so football men and I have that in common. And anyway, roid rage is like a minor little hissy fit compared to the level of hormone-imbalance-induced fury that my menopausal sisters and I contain on a daily basis.

I don’t NEED to play football, or know anything about football, or even have the biological capability to play football, to be a professional football coach. And if you think I do, that’s just your scarcity mindset.

Click HERE if you want to tell me what a good idea you think it is for me, a person who has never played football, watched football, or even thought about football, to coach football.

See you in my seminar! 🏈🏃‍♀️🏆

Here is the text of the email (quoted) with my analysis interjected (bolded). I never respond to these men in any way whatsoever.

“Name: Joe [redacted]

Email: [redacted]

Type of Inquiry: Other

Subject: Help/advice"

Message: Hi Jenny,

My name is Joe and yes I’m not a women and I realize that may seem odd! I came across your article on dating after 50 while on Apple News. You struck a cord with me personally with dating apps and the many pitfalls that exist on them. Attitudes and many fake profiles are no joke as I painfully found out.”

Right out of the gate, Joe is the victim 🙄. Women literally get raped and killed from meeting men on the dating apps, but Joe here, like so many courageous men before him, has been victimized by “attitudes” (😂😂😂) and “fake profiles.” He found this out “painfully.” 🙄

“At the end of 2025 going into winter 2026 I had my profile on Match after not being on dating apps in many years boy has it changed! I was on for 6 months and I finally gave up after never going out on a date and being informed that about 15 women I had contact with were removed for suspicious activity.”

Emoji-only reaction: 🎻🎻🎻 🎭🎭🎭 🙄🙄🙄

“So why am I reaching out to you? I’m hoping you could give me some dating advice on dating in 2026. You could say no and that would be fine I would just move on.”

Okayyyyyyyyyy. Hold the phone. Men say sh*t like this constantly, and it flies under the radar, so let’s break it down: Joe is giving me permission to not accommodate him. Joe that I don’t know. Joe who has already stated that he knows I work only with women. He’s reassuring me that if I “say no” he will “just move on,” as though he has any other legal option.

“In the end if I don’t try I’ll never know if you could help a guy like me. I’m willing to try if you’re willing to listen to me.”

😂😂😂 What?! This is the funniest line because of the implication. Joe’s assumption here is that I would receive some sort of personal, emotional reward from him “trying.” He’s making a deal with me: he’s willing to try if I’m willing to listen to him. What on earth would I gain from this deal? There’s clearly no academic, monetary, or cultural capitol at stake; I would just get . . . to help Joe? Why would I care? Do you see the entitlement that must be operating beneath the surface for Joe-Strange-Man-On-The-Internet to assume that I’m invested in his happiness? I honestly do not think he’s trying to be ridiculous; he believes this, and it’s revealing of how a lot of men enter the dating market: they assume that women exist as balms to their souls and fixers of their issues, and moreover, that this is somehow OUR goal as well—to soothe and fix them. The audacity it requires to hold this belief is staggering. The dating apps are peppered with men like Joe, men who have created an entire fictional economy that resides only in their imaginations, an economy in which men’s time, attention, desire, and feelings comprise both capitol and profit—not only for themselves, but for any hypothetical woman on earth.

“I feel like I am a decent person who has a lot to give the right person but I just don’t know how to go about finding that person? Any help your willing to give me would be greatly appreciated!!! I’m fully aware you only give advice to women but for what ever reason I feel like I needed to reach out anyway.”

Interesting. Joe is “fully aware,” and yet he thought, for some reason, that I would make an exception for him, a total stranger-man from the internet with nothing to offer me other than the opportunity to interact with Joe, I guess. Joe is one of those men who attempts to enter women’s spaces and somehow does not see that as a transgression. Weird.

"Thanks for considering my odd request. -Joe.”

I didn’t consider it, but thank you to Joe for the content for this article. 🙄

*This piece was originally published in my (now shuttered) Rhetoric in Real Life Substack.

The title of this article is what I said to the elderly gentleman I passed while on my morning run today. His dog, also clearly elderly, walked slowly alongside him, unleashed and peaceful.

“Yeah, she’s a good dog, but she’s a female, so she has her days,” was his reply.

I want to talk about the words “but” and “so” in this sentence. Both those words are coordinating conjunctions, and there are five others, seven total in the English language (you may have learned the acronym FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).

One job of coordinating conjunctions is to join two or more independent clauses into one sentence. An independent clause is simply a group of words that could also be a stand-alone sentence. In the man’s sentence above, those clauses are:

1. Yeah, she’s a good dog,

2. but she’s a female,

3. so she has her days.

Let’s address the first coordinating conjunction (CC): “But” is a CC of contradiction; it implies an opposition between the things it joins. It signals something unexpected.

For example, I might say, “I had a root canal, but it wasn’t unpleasant.”

The reason the “but” works in this case is that we *expect* a root canal to be unpleasant. The word “but” sparks a little mental signal that there’s a contradiction coming.

It would NOT make sense for me to say, “I had a picnic with my best friend on a beautiful autumn day, but it was fun.”

The reason that sentence doesn’t work is that the word “but” implies something surprising or unexpected, but there isn’t anything unexpected here; a picnic on a lovely autumn day with a best friend SHOULD be fun.

The sentence should’ve been stated, “I had a picnic with my best friend on a beautiful autumn day, and it was fun” or “I had a picnic with my best friend on a beautiful autumn day, so it was fun.”

The CC “and” implies “go together,” whereas the CC “so” implies “cause and effect,” as in, “It was freezing cold, so I wore mittens.” The temperature caused the need for mittens.

Let’s go back to this man’s use of coordinating conjunctions, understanding that in critical discourse analysis, people’s language is considered revelatory; it reveals their underlying attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs.

His use of the word “but” implies that he perceives a contradiction between his dog being a “good dog” and being female:

“Yeah, she’s a good dog, but she’s a female . . .”

His use of the word “so” implies that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between her being female and her getting into trouble/being moody/being annoying, etc.:

“ . . . but she’s female, so she has her days.”

I share this mini-analysis to demonstrate how seemingly-insignificant words—just little functional conjunctions in this case—can actually be very telling when studied through the lens of critical discourse analysis.

Put more crassly: This docile-seeming gentlemen, when given a compliment about his docile and well-behaved dog, could have just said “thank you.” Instead, he quite literally called her a bitch. I write this more with humor than as any kind of gigantic social commentary; this is too small a sample from which to draw larger conclusions.

Still, I found it interesting, and I hope some readers may also.

Thank you for reading, Rhetoric Friends!

In 2017, I sold the gray house in the background and pared down my life’s possessions to that cube in the foreground, plus what I could fit in my tiny Subaru hatchback (which was not much, considering it also had to contain me, my kid, our cat, and our golden retriever).

We pulled out of that Ohio town and headed to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for my new faculty gig, as the Avett Brothers crooned, “We are headed north.”

We were headed north. I’m still north.

***

Beginning when I was in middle school, I’ve been fascinated with the way people live. I remember looking around at neighborhoods and farmhouses and apartment buildings and wondering, “Why do we all live in these boxes? And why are they all the same?” I was obsessed (OBSESSED) with the show “Extreme Homes” because it showed people who didn’t accept the default, people who quite literally thought outside the box.

My undergraduate degree is in interior design, which is probably a surprise to those of you who know me through Burned Haystack. My first design gig was at a swanky residential firm in Denver.

The firm was all women, small, and boutique-y. There was a vibe. It’s hard to describe the vibe, but I’ll tell you this: there was a system of senior designers and junior designers who worked in pairs on each job, the senior designers mentoring and bringing the junior designers along in our careers. I’m pretty sure none of the senior designers had to work for money; they were of a social strata that didn’t require it, and they pretty much all quit to become full-time socialite moms as soon as they had babies. The junior designers were young women like me—ambitious and energetic and making up in tech skills what we lacked in client experience. I think I got the job because in those days I was really good on AutoCAD, which was so new at that time that most seniors designers and architects couldn’t run it themselves.

On my first day, as I was shown around the warehouse-turned-trendy-loft space in the LoDo area of Denver—right by the Rockies stadium—I felt like I was walking through a dream. The dream was constructed of wide-plank reclaimed wood floors and exposed brick walls and Persian rugs (the real ones) and aged leather furniture. There was a holstein cow flattened into a rug beneath my desk.

After the tour, our assistant took me aside and gave me business cards for “our hair stylist, our massage therapist, our herbalist up in Boulder, and our chiropractor.”

“Oh, I don’t really need to go to a chiropractor,” I said. “I’m not hurt or anything.”

“Well,” she said, “You could probably use some kind of adjustment somewhere.” Then she said, “Oh, and here’s a set of keys to our vacation home in Jackson Hole. You can go there whenever you want.”

Having been raised middle-class in the midwest, where the holstein cows are all three-dimensional, the seemingly-mandatory herbalist and massage therapist seemed a little weird to me, but also I was 24 and there was a vacation home in Jackson Hole, and I could not believe I had landed this job. I called my mom in Ohio (from a pay phone) and told her, “You should see where I am right now.”

Over the next three months (they hired all junior designers on a three-month trial basis), I became rapidly and almost-totally disillusioned. I was interested in design challenges, in maximizing space in creative ways when there wasn’t enough of it; I was interested in the relationships between people and ergonomic factors such as lighting and ceiling heights and adjacencies to relevant spaces.

Because of the work we did here, those challenges simply didn’t exist. There was unlimited money, way more space than anyone ever needed to live in, and far too much negotiating marital tensions and disagreements over whether the throw pillows in the master suite should be knife-edge or brush-fringe, should they be Scandinavian or French Country??? I didn’t care.

Most of our clients were men who’d just purchased their third vacation home with their fourth wife, and the whole thing struck me as vapid and excessive and embarrassing.

When it came time for my three-month review, I told the HR director that I didn’t think I was a good fit for this firm, that I needed to find something that aligned more closely with my values. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “Okay, what can we do here. Do you want more money?”

I stood up and quietly walked out, walked directly into the first existential crisis of my career.

I took a job as a straight-up draftsperson, and I just sat in my cubicle all day and drew blueprints for cell phone towers for an engineering firm in Denver; our clients were Sprint and AT&T, right at the dawn of mass cell phone communication in America. I was the only woman in the entire firm, and I was only 25; I knew nothing. Other than drafting, my only duties were to go up on top of building roofs with the engineers and figure out how far the coax cable had to be run from the connection to the cell tower (the diameter of the required coaxial cable is based upon the length of the run. I know, this is so boring, lol. I’m sorry, this part is almost over).

I got pregnant and had a baby during that job, and the pregnancy was complicated and involved a dicey major surgery and a painful recovery (I had an ovarian tumor that was discovered during an early ultrasound — story for a different piece, which I am highly unlikely to write if I’m being honest). I went back to work full-time (which meant overtime in that field in that era) when I got out of the hospital, against doctor’s orders, but we needed the income. I punched my time card on Friday afternoon at the end of a long week, went directly to Starbucks for an iced tea, and my water broke right there while I was standing at the counter 😬.

Seven months after our son was born, we moved across the country back to Ohio amidst a family medical crisis, and these were difficult days. Most of that span of time exists only as a fuzzy cloud to me now, of stress and worry and exhaustion and not being able to eat.

I ended up going to work for an architecture firm in Akron, Ohio, whose client base was comprised of public libraries. It felt like destiny. It combined my love of art and design and concept development with books! And it felt socially-redeeming compared to my other design jobs. It was a small firm owned by a somewhat-unhinged Vietnam vet who was a creative genius. He trusted me and gave me almost total artistic freedom. I loved that job. The office was a renovated barn, and there were live bats hanging from the ceiling and a black cat who roamed freely from desk to desk; sometimes she sat on my lap all day while I drew.

Unlike the upscale vacation-home gig, space truly was at a premium in the public libraries, and therefore this job also offered the intellectual/artistic challenge I wanted: “lack of money and square footage but offers a social good and everyone wants it to be cool.”

Five years later, my boss’s wife became gravely ill and he sold the firm to a large corporation, which made sense, but then we all hated it and quit (including him).

For several years at this point, I’d been fantasizing about being an English teacher. I already did all the writing for the architecture firm—client communications and marketing—and I loved that part of the job. Constructing documents and arguments is not that different from constructing buildings: you need a foundation, logical connections, supports that hold up, aesthetic elements that are authentic to the task. It all felt very inter-connected to me, in intricate ways.

At the point the architecture firm disbanded, my husband and I were in a better place financially, and I could take a step back from working so much. I got a master’s in secondary education, taught high school for a year, made the leap to higher ed, got a divorce, got a Ph. D., and our son graduated from high school and went off to Ohio State while I got a tenure track job and headed up to Wisconsin (that’s called “compression” in creative nonfiction, what I just did. Did I leave out TONS? Yes. So much. It’s just not all relevant to this particular article).

What IS relevant to this particular article is that I started over in a small apartment with very few possessions. And because of that, I suddenly had a lot more time to focus on other things. It’s amazing what you can get done when you don’t have to mow the lawn, clean two stories, lie awake at night panicked over how much it’s going to cost to have your entire basement floor jackhammered up so that the plumber can rebuild the sewage pipe system that has apparently disintegrated beneath the weight of your home and the weight of being 120 years old. I wish this were a hypothetical example.

Over the next few years, I decided I didn’t want to own a house ever again, nor did I want any more space than the space I had at that time (which was 750 square feet for 750 dollars a month; excellent symmetry). My new life felt so much freer, so much more active and creative and full of possibilities. I was untethered from things, from stuff. There wasn’t much room or much to do inside, so I spent way more time outside. I took my dog hiking by the lake, and we sat by the river in the evenings and talked to my neighbors. I made friends with my colleagues and spent whole weekends camped out in coffee shops writing and chatting and laughing.

There’s another angle here too, and it’s one I don’t think we consider or talk about enough:

People, and especially women-people, tend to get trapped beneath stuff, both figuratively and literally. I’ve heard friends lament that they want to leave their toxic husbands or partners, but there’s just, like . . . all this stuff. The photo albums, the china, the school pictures on the walls and the Christmas tree ornaments. And it all just feels like too much, and so they remain trapped. The legal tangles and the financial consequences are going to be plenty hard to navigate, and then on top of that there’s all this STUFF to be divided. It feels impossible, and so they stay, partly because of their stuff. This may be an oversimplification, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration.

And even if you take destructive relationship factors out of the equation, the stuff alone is oppressive. Our houses become repositories for children’s discarded objects, inherited heirlooms, and all the other detritus of life. In a world circumscribed by rampant materialism, sentimentality becomes weaponized in a way that encourages us to hold onto things we don’t even want, let alone need, and it suffocates us. We become unwitting curators of museums we never planned to administrate.

***

There are two ways out of being smothered by your stuff—one is by force and the other is by choice. You don’t want the former option. You don’t want your house to burn down or to be partnered with someone who is so frightening that you have to flee, though in terms of getting rid of stuff those options are both highly efficient.

You can choose it, though, and as someone who has, I recommend it strongly. It’s true there was one episode of my life in which I had to exit a domestic situation quickly—the forced downsizing model—but I was already committed to minimalism at that point, and thus is was easier on me. The part about losing stuff was easier on me, is what I’m saying. This is a lesson, too: women who’ve already made the decision to not be trapped by stuff cannot have their own possessions held for ransom against them, cannot become victims of material extortion: “So I’ll lose everything if I leave? Fine. Bye.”

I’m personally at a crossroads right now — I went from that 3-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment to a studio apartment (one room only, so at that point I had VERY little stuff). I’m now in a two-bedroom apartment, which feels spacious and comfortable, but honestly I’m not sure I need all this space (it’s not a lot of space by midwestern standards, just a normal two-bedroom unit, but most of the world lives in much less, and thus I’m questioning if I need this).

Anyway, this is the most rambling Substack article I’ve ever written, but the background stuff about home design feels important at least in my own mind because of how long it’s held my fascination.

The point of the article is this:

There are so many ways in which minimalism is both empowering and freeing. I hope some of you will share your stories in the comments ⬇️❤️

This is both easy and hard to answer. It’s easy because I know the answer; it’s hard because I know the answer might hurt. Here’s my best attempt:

Toxic rhetorical patterns are toxic rhetorical patterns. They manifest in the first Hinge message, the first date, the family, the workplace, the friendship, and the decades-long marriage.

The longer they operate and circulate within relationship dynamics, the more entrenched they become. In rhetorical studies, we would say that “the discourses of toxicity (or control, or aggression, or whatever) become naturalized over time.” Once a discourse has become naturalized, it is extremely difficult to break out of because to be naturalized is to be invisible. It’s the proverbial water a fish swims in—so constant and ubiquitous that the fish fails to note its presence.

The reason red flag rhetorical patterns are so useful in Burned-Haystack-the-dating-method is that identifying them very early can save you from a world of hurt (and frequently overt abuse) in the long run. They truly are red flags at that point; you can see them, and they signal danger as they flap around in the wind.

If the red flags are in your house, though, they’re not so bright anymore, and they’re probably not waving in the wind. Instead, they have frayed into threads, and those threads have woven themselves into the carpets and draperies, entwined themselves in your clothing and your hair. It’s a much tougher scenario.

So what do you do, when Burned Haystack is not a dating method, but a magnifying glass or a mirror? I think there are a few options, but I think one thing is really important no matter what option you choose:

Denying reality makes people insane—literally. It’s better to live honestly and consciously in a shitty reality than to gaslight yourself into false narratives that serve others as you destroy yourself from the inside out.

I think it’s important that you allow yourself to see things as they actually are, even if it’s painful to confront, and regardless of what you decide to do about it (or not; I recognize that “just leave him” is not always the best or even a possible option).

I also realize there are people who will tell you something like this:

Read all about Burned Haystack. Discuss the method with your partner. Use the book as an artifact to confront the problems in your relationship.

I’m not going to advise that. I know that could be dangerous with some men. If there’s some outlier clueless dude out there who just needs to be shown the light as it reflects off my book and then he’ll magically evolve, then so be it, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

So here’s what I’d do:

Learn the patterns and then simply observe. Are you seeing them in your partner? Some are more dangerous than others. These are the ones I’d be most concerned about in a long-term relationship:

• Disciplinary/directive: this one is by far the most common and the most dangerous.

• Conditional decency: also high-danger, in my opinion, and likely to be associated with abusive patterns.

• Test and apologize: boundary violations are almost always present in abusive situations.

• Crazy-making communication: frequently associated with gaslighting and other forms of psychological manipulation.

• Were you at the Capitol on January 6th?: if your partner has been radicalized by red-pill aggression and stupidity, I believe he is dangerous.

• Looking for a tradwife: ditto if he’s suddenly pressuring you to “return to conservative values” or be “equally yoked” or “submit to his authority as the head of the family” or hand over your salary or give up your salary altogether or anything else that hurls you forcibly back to 1950; you are in an unstable and untenable situation.

• Everything I wrote above ⬆️ about the tradwife pattern also falls into the weaponized spirituality pattern.

I’m not in the business of advising people on their long-term relationships because I am not a therapist or psychologist. As a rhetorician, though, I can tell you that the rhetorical patterns I just referred to above tend to be associated with toxicity, dysfunction, manipulation, and in some cases abuse.

But maybe it’s not that bad . . .

Maybe he’s exhibiting “Are you my mother?” or behaving like a rescue pup or an Eeyore. Maybe he’s making you a “receptacle for randomness,” or become some annoying version of a “Fitness Bro.” These patterns might be irritating but not necessarily toxic or anything you’d want to end a relationship over. I don’t know.

What I do know is that clear-eyed information is affirming and empowering. I would much rather hear a woman say, “Yeah, my husband is a disciplinary / directive asshole and I’m deciding what to do about it” than watch a woman cover for him, defend his behavior, take ownership of it herself, or delude herself into thinking it’s okay. I’d rather a woman admit her husband got a little red-pilled and she’s now working around him than get sucked into the Manosphere herself and start participating in her own humiliation and disrespect.

If you start examining your long-term relationship through the lens of Burned Haystack and you find that there are entrenched and persistent toxic rhetorical patterns at play, talk to someone. Your friends, your female relatives, your therapist, your clergy-person if you trust them.

I believe that once you begin dwelling in and naming the truth—even if it’s a truth you hate—then other wise voices will affirm you in your newfound insight. And that alone is worth a lot. At the very least, even if you decide to remain in your relationship for now, you’ve named a truth and thrown out some lifelines. That’s huge. You’re building yourself a net. Maybe you just use it from time to time, a resting place where you’re safe and supported. Or maybe you take the big jump and the net is in place to catch you.

Having this net, this communion with other women, is vital. The Burned Haystack community is serving this purpose to some degree right now, and I’m currently building a new platform that will facilitate virtual and IRL meetups and also offer specialized discussion forums that focus on topics such as coercive control, spiritual abuse, grief, dating with disabilities, etc. (please stay tuned; more details coming soon).

At my book opener in Brooklyn, two women came through the signing line together. They’d connected through the Burned Haystack Facebook group as they were both emerging from lifetimes of religious abuse. Their relief (and genuine joy) in finding each other and forming this friendship was palpable on their faces. I didn’t even ask if either of them were dating, and it never came up; I was just so happy to see them together.

I know that a LOT of pain preceded that happiness, and a lot of difficult truth-facing must have served as the bridge from isolated pain to that comforting friendship; I only saw them on the other side of the bridge, but it was a beautiful thing to see.

If you’re still residing on the painful side, mired in fear and conflict and confusion, first: I am sorry. ((🩵)) I truly don’t know if this method or my book makes things easier or harder, at least initially. I also don’t know if you should cross that bridge. But I do know that just by virtue of asking the question in the title, you’ve already seen glimpses of something and had the courage to name it, and you’re already part of this community. No matter what you decide to do, those things remain, and they make you smarter and stronger. And I hope it’s okay for me to speak for all the women in this community and say that we’ll be here for you regardless of what you decide to do. ❤️

Dear Burned Haystack Community 🔥🥰,

I’ve never written just to this group before. As probably most of you know, I post all content in front of the paywall so that it’s accessible to everyone. The financial support you have been providing—for no reason other than a belief in our mission and the goodness of your hearts, I assume—has made it possible for m…

Read more

Click here for links to get it wherever you buys books, U.S. and international.

Here’s the original post from the BH community member:

Here’s the full letter:

Let’s analyze his rhetorical moves by reading this letter together (I’ve transcribed the lines so you don’t have to keep scrolling up and down).

Here’s how I’m going to write this article and why:

I’m going to respond pretty much line-by-line to this guy, hypothetically, of course, since I don’t know him. Here’s the benefit of doing this:

We’ve all been socialized to take men’s dissatisfaction and pain Very Seriously. Too seriously. I’m talking specifically about problematic men having problematic problems, obviously, not decent men experiencing true hardship.

Once you start reading these problematic men’s words the way we’re about to read them together in this article, it gets a lot easier to avoid being sucked into their nonsense and manipulation.

Over time, when you start reading this kind of communication through a critical lens, a feminist-rhetoric critical lens in this case, you’ll end up developing a snarkily-accurate dialogue style inside your head. You’ll stop second-guessing yourself, stop enabling men’s manipulation and gaslighting, see clearly through the games, and probably crack yourself up.

Humor is empowering; let’s laugh together. Here we go . . .

“I am writing this to you since you won’t talk to me.”

Interesting choice. Perhaps the fact that she won’t communicate with you should have suggested that she doesn’t want to communicate with you.

“Just to let you know that I am done with constantly trying.”

This is the equivalent of “YOU CAN’T FIRE ME, I QUIT!” It’s kind of hilarious. She’s literally TOLD him to stop trying, and now he’s using that as a threat? Exactly what he already knows she wants him to do?

Reassuring her he still loves her and she’s still important to him.

I am continually shocked at this faulty assumption on the part of men; it’s pervasive and ubiquitous. Here’s how it manifests (I guess; it’s still baffling to me, but it must manifest like this inside their heads):

He does something bad. She cuts him off. He assumes that her primary concern is HOW HE FEELS ABOUT HER. This sounds bananas, but I’ve read this particular rhetorical move from more men than I can count (including some I’ve received personally).

Think about what this reveals: This reveals a very deep-level belief that women’s PRIMARY concern, regardless of what’s happened, is how men feel about us. I have read “the day after” apology letters from abusive men who “apologize” by reassuring their victims that they still love them even though they hurt them. They believe, I guess, that this counts as reparation: “I know I hurt you, but I still love you and I’m still into you, so that makes things okay for you.” It’s insane.

“I cannot apologize enough I guess.”

It’s the “I guess” that’s the operative phrase here. It changes the whole translation.

It’s not this: “I cannot apologize enough because my words and actions were so egregious that an apology is insufficient.

It’s this: “I cannot apologize enough, apparently, because you are being super difficult and refusing to behave as though none of this ever happened.”

More reassuring her about her worth and how highly he thinks of her, even to the point of emphasizing that this is a “huge compliment” since it’s coming from him. (😂)

He’s just doubling down on the “Clearly everything is okay because I love you and my internal feelings and desires trump all other elements of concrete reality” effect that I described above.

“I only hope that you figure out whatever it is before it’s too late.”

Is this a threat? It sure sounds like a threat. Are you threatening her with exactly what she wants, which is to be left alone by you? Or something worse. Also, it already IS too late. It’s too late for you, Dude.

“I am honestly and unfortunately starting to care less every day.”

Unfortunate for whom?

“My heart can only take so much and I am at my end with all of it.”

Excellent. Be on your way, then, to wherever.

“That’s all, I can really say.”

Redundant. This is an unwelcome letter, not an airport; you don’t have to announce your departure. Just quit writing.

Also, that comma was unnecessary.

END OF ANALYSIS. Have any of you received letters of this genre? Please share.

I am probably the last person on earth who should attempt to translate any sort of religious text into a real life application, but I’m going to do it anyway because I think this is a useful thought experiment.

I have no spiritual affiliation other than an on-again-off-again fascination with witchcraft, but my partner is a practicing (liberal) Catholic, and I went to church with him this morning. We are currently visiting my family in Cleveland, and as we left for church I yelled to my elderly parents, “See you heathens later!” which only cracked us up since I am such a heathen myself.

So anyway, I am very much an outsider in the discourse communities of faith, but as I listened to the lyrics of this hymn in church today, I realized how germane its thesis could be to healthy relationships. Let’s look at the lyrics, and then we’ll analyze:

“Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” (based upon the Prayer of St. Francis)

Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is error, the truth;
where there is doubt, the faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Overall, I would summarize the prayer’s thesis like this:

I seek to act as a peacemaker who actively improves the situations and relationships I enter. I choose to focus on comforting, understanding, and loving others rather than demanding others provide these things to me.

This is, arguably, decent advice for anyone of any gender in any kind of relationship with other humans. If you’re a woman on the dating apps, though, you might note how exactly opposite this orientation seems when compared to the vast majority of men’s bios.

What I see in dating app men’s bios over and over again are these elements:

• statements of looking for a woman to “be my peace” (rhetorical pattern: “Peace Seekers,” which frequently intersects with “Looking for a Tradwife”)

• demanding hypothetical comfort and consolation from women they haven’t even met yet (rhetorical pattern: “Are You My Mother?”)

• bemoaning how they’ve never really been loved or understood (rhetorical pattern: “Eeyores on the Apps”)

Imagine how different they would come across if their bios and prompts fell into accordance with St. Francis. I make this point not as a pro tip for men (who, I promise, are not reading this—I have access to readership metrics, and I know for a fact that men don’t read my stuff); rather, I make this point to offer it as a heuristic for women in vetting the apps. Ask yourself:

“Is this person presenting himself as an adult who is thoughtful and prepared to actively contribute to the situations and relationships he enters? Or is he presenting as a child wailing for his mommy to calm him down and make everything okay for him?”

It’s more common to locate men’s profile text at various points along that spectrum than at either extreme end of it, but maybe see if you can determine which side it leans toward:

An extreme alignment with St. Francis is probably performative, and an extreme alignment with Demanding Toddler or Whiny Eeyore wouldn’t trick you anyway, so, like most heuristics, use this one more like a magnifying glass or a divining rod—see if you can analyze men’s language to find their point between the two extremes, and only spend time and energy on the men whose words seem to more closely echo the spirit of St. Francis.

Please feel free to share your own heuristics below 🔥❤️ (lots more about them and how to develop/apply them in my book).

If you are a single woman beyond the age of 35, you are likely regularly pummeled with expressions of sympathy and speculative horror fiction of what it could mean to die alone (we’re going to bust that myth shortly here, so just stay tuned).

Let’s start by defining “Boston Marriage,” since if you’re one of the 99.9% of people who did not major in feminist literature and theory, you may not be familiar:

The term refers to a long-term, committed partnership between two women, usually involving shared travel and cohabitation. It emerged as a relationship structure in the 19th century, primarily in literary circles. The inspirations for these pairings were economic, domestic, and emotional, perhaps in equal measure. Whether or not the relationship was sexual or platonic wasn’t the point and wasn’t openly discussed, given the era (it’s most likely that these relationships ran the gamut from friendship to asexual romance to lesbianism).

New England in that time was a place where women were still very much expected to marry and become mothers, but there were also burgeoning intellectual opportunities for women, especially in writing and publishing. Unfortunately, these new professional options did not always provide the economic or domestic infrastructure to adequately support women living independently.

Thus, the Boston marriage was born. Living in partnership provided women emotional companionship, safer travel options, easier entry to intellectual communities, and the ability to share living expenses. You can read more about the details of these “marriages” in this article.

The best thing about the Boston marriage, in my opinion, was its radical creativity and its ability to not only fill gaps but to propel women forward in exciting new ways. Fast-forward to 2026, and we’re seeing a whole new array of options for women. There are many reasons for this:

• More women than ever are prioritizing careers and individual goals over marriage and family.

• Reproductive freedom is being throttled (in America, at least), which means the risks of partnering with men are higher and therefore less worth it.

• Christian Nationalism and efforts toward the reversal of no-fault divorce and household-voting (I can’t believe I just typed that, but here we are) are resulting in many young women opting out of traditional couple/family structures altogether.

• A rising Manosphere makes dating heterosexual men somewhere between annoying and downright dangerous, and the gender divide seems to only be growing. A lot of women have decided it’s simply not worth it.

That was a depressing list, I know, but the opportunities these conditions are engendering are exciting and encouraging. Here’s another list, and I offer this one for anyone who wants to entertain new ideas or explore other options:

• There are all-women communities popping up across the planet: from the north flats of London to Kenya to rural Texas. Many of them make provisions for interactions and relationships with men, including procreation, but these intentional homelands are for women (and sometimes children) only in terms of who calls the shots and who calls it “home.”

• There are emerging movements—many of which are social media driven—that facilitate living near/with friends intentionally, not just incidentally. You can read about the theory of it here, and some concrete possibilities right here.

• And it’s not only geographic boundaries that are being stretched. This Washington Post article examines a contemporary lavender marriage and also one comprised of “asexual tradwives.” Here’s an excerpt:

In late 2023, April Lexi Lee told her parents that she was going to marry her childhood best friend.

“They were shocked, but at the same time, not surprised,” Lee, 28, said as she smoked a cigarette outside of her parents’ apartment in Singapore. She was visiting her family while her wife, Renee Wong, 27, was holding down the fort at their home in Los Angeles.

Lee and Wong had been close since they met at age 12. During the pandemic shutdowns, when Wong was in Singapore and Lee was in California, they were spending hours on FaceTime every day.

Then Lee’s TikTok algorithm started delivering her videos about “Boston marriages,” a term from the 19th century for pairs of women who lived together without men. “We didn’t even know it was an option, and then we were like, ‘Wait, this makes so much sense,’” Lee said.

Lee and Wong started cohabitating and sharing finances. Marriage wasn’t on either of their minds until Wong had a health issue that required surgery.

“It became really clear that we are family, but on paper we are nothing,” Lee said. She looked back at the times when they were on separate continents. “I would want to be able to be at the border and say, ‘My wife is in here.’ Not just ‘my best friend.’”

Lee and Wong are both on the asexual spectrum. Lee has been happily celibate for years. Wong, who identifies as “solo poly,” occasionally dates outside their marriage.

• There are even lesbian tradwives now, though the term is more “subversive co-opting” of the tradwife movement than adherence to it. I kind of love that.

But here’s the crux of all of this:

There are social scripts, and following them offers some degree of safety and acceptance and comfort: graduate from high school, go to college, marry someone of the opposite gender, buy a house, have babies, raise the family, launch the family, receive grandchildren, and on and on.

But social scripts don’t serve everyone, they don’t work out for everyone, and they change over time; they’re supposed to change over time—that’s productive evolution.

“The world only spins forward” (Tony Kushner, Angels in America). Women are tired of waiting for men to straighten themselves out and become egalitarian, monogamous partners who are capable of functioning as full grown adults.

Rather than being patient or passively waiting, women are beginning to flick at that metaphorically spinning globe, to nudge the spin a little faster, to knock it out of orbit just enough to get people’s attention, to destabilize things in a way that demands attention and requires re-stabilization.

And in many cases, the re-stabilization looks better, whether that means coming home after a hard day to prepare dinner with a bunch of girlfriends or sinking into the couch with your gay husband or just cherishing your own space in a way that’s celebratory rather than conciliatory.

To return to the “You’re gonna die alone!” threat, I’ll leave you with this reel. Thank you for reading ❤️🔥

ps: I wrote this piece to be encouraging, and I hope it accomplishes that. I also realize that many women still want that traditional dream—liberal, progressive women included—and I believe it’s still a valid dream. You can healthily slot yourself and your partner into a heteronormative division of labor if that’s what works best for you and as long as no one is being diminished or disempowered (just yesterday I said to my partner, “Please stop trying to help me in the kitchen. This is my domain. The dogs and the car are your domain, and we need to both stick with what we’re good at.” I was kind of joking but also not really. I crack a lot of jokes about being a “fake tradwife,” but what I really mean by that is that I prefer to perform traditionally-female forms of labor while maintaining my commitment to feminism and political progressivism. I think it’s a possible thing to do).

Okay, sorry, enough from me. Please discuss . . . . . . . ❤️

Photo by kevin turcios on Unsplash

First, you need the background. Here’s a Burned Haystack Success Story that a community member shared online today:

When I initially went back to dating, I partially implemented the burned haystack method. I thought that somehow I knew more or somebody was different - I found out really quickly the partial implementation of the method was not good. 

After healing from those wounds, my older daughter suggested that I give Hinge a try. I curated my profile, following all the rules and immediately received a rose. This person‘s profile met all of the criteria. He also thoughtfully responded to my profile and only talked about the stuff I wrote. We were perfectly aligned politically and in our interest. 

As many have said before on this profile, he did not initially seem like he was my type. I had always dated people with an edge and from our short interaction it didn’t seem like he had an edge. But, he had a passion for art and politics and I’ve never dated anybody like that before. I leaned into the method and just began to get to know him. 

We started messaging back-and-forth and we quickly found out how connected we were in our lives. His mom was my oldest daughter‘s second grade teacher. We went to the same high school and knew a lot of the same people. His former sister-in-law was one of my really good friends, so she was able to support his good character. I taught his niece. Strangely enough, he lives less than a block from my ex-husband. It became quickly apparent that we should’ve met a long time ago…but the timing wasn’t right until now.

The first week of messaging was really great, but I knew that I didn’t want to start dating right away. I had a lot going on in my work life and my youngest daughter had been fighting an illness so I just didn’t have time for it. I told him that I was very interested in him, but I needed to take a step back for a month or so and focus on other parts of my life. He said he understood and I walked away, knowing that I would be back.

A month and a half later my second job was done, my daughter was fully healed, and I was ready to date again. I sent him another message and he responded in the sweetest way. He made it very clear that he understood why I had taken the time away and he was happy that I was able to come back and focus on dating again. We began to message again.

Our first date was supposed to be coffee, but my basement flooded. My carpet had been ruined and I had to remove it all. I reached out to him and let him know that the only appointment I could get at the dump was during our first coffee date. He then offered to meet me at the dump to help me get my carpet lifted into the dumpsters. Our first date was the dump.

Our relationship continued on slowly. He asked permission before any physical contact. Our first hug didn’t happen for several dates and our first peck on the cheek was not for several dates after that. Every interaction involved permission first. Almost all of the permission happened before we went on our date. Then, during the date he would ask permission before he would do anything. I was able to lead that part of our relationship and I have never experienced it like that before. 

As a relationship progressed, we found that we had even more connections than we had ever imagined. These connections allowed us to seamlessly fit into each other’s lives in ways that I could not believe. Our friends and family both comment on how it feels like we have always been in their lives. This is the first person that I’ve ever dated where things just feel easy and uncomplicated.

I found my needle ❤️

This was my response to her post:

And then someone commented in response to my response:

This is a fantastic question, and here's my heuristic for it (my book has a whole section on heuristics; they're super powerful and you'll do better dating if you understand them):

At the beginning of dating someone, don't ask yourself if you think he's "the one" or if the chemistry is hot enough or even how you feel in the abstract. Instead, ask yourself this:

If someone told me right now that I will never see this person again in my life, which of these options is the closest to the answer:

a) totally neutral; truly don’t care

b) relieved, even a tiny bit

c) disappointed, even very mildly

If your answer is a or b, it’s probably not going anywhere. If it’s “c,” even by a hair, I would give it more time. That’s your subconscious telling you something, making a tiny space for you to be open to something different that might be better and healthier for you.

It’s no guarantee, but judging from more burned haystack success stories than I can count at this point, it’s at least a tiny flicker of hope.

My own success story started very slowly—nearly identical to the woman’s story shared above, except that it didn’t feature a first-date trip to the dump, which I believe we can all agree is epic. ✨

The point, though, is that I was also very uncertain about how I felt, but when I asked myself this clarifying question, I landed firmly in the “c” category. I had no idea where things were going or if there was any chemistry at all on the horizon, but I realized I’d be genuinely disappointed if someone told me I was never going to get to see Pat again. Giving it more time was one of the smartest and healthiest decisions I’ve ever made.

If you’re still in the camp of insisting that chemistry is either there or it isn’t, from Date One, well, I guess that’s fine, but I’m just here to tell you that there were a LOT of us in that camp (a frustrating, infuriating, lonely, and frequently “this is the road to dysfunction and abuse” camp), and we were flat wrong.

I used to think that too —- vehemently. And I was wrong.

Chemistry can and does develop over time, and it might be the best chemistry of your life. 🔥❤️

There were 4500 men and boys at Freedom Con this Father’s Day Weekend, and that’s “a lot,” I guess.

But let’s put it in context:

• It’s roughly half the attendee count of the annual MLA convention (that’s “Modern Language Association”—you know the organization that makes citation rules for academic writing in the humanities? No? That’s because MLA is incredibly niche and also inconsequential to society, but their annual event is still twice as big as Freedom Con; so that’s an important comparative point).

• There was a 10K race in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the same week as Freedom Con, and it drew over 10,000 runners. It’s called “The Bellin Run.” You’ve probably not heard of that either unless you live in Green Bay. It’s only locally famous, but still more than twice as famous as Freedom Con.

• If you’re part of the Burned Haystack community, and I assume you are if you’re reading this, well: the total attendee count of Freedom Con amounted to about 1.3% of our membership. We’re not even famous, but we’re 77 times more famous than Freedom Con, if you crunch actual numbers.

What all of this means is that this is very much a fringe movement. The fact that these men are emotionally unstable and obsessed with guns does make them individually dangerous (mostly to their wives and children, for anyone paying attention to statistics), but they shouldn’t be taken seriously in a sociopolitical context.

They get a lot of attention because they are a spectacle and because their weirdness renders them more clickable material than, say, hundreds of thousands of rational women calmly and humorously discussing irrational men.

Why is mainstream media paying so much attention to these insecure maniacs and their gingham-clad tradwives? (The cover image on this article is from the piece New York Times ran, but they’re getting a lot of media attention in general right now). It’s shock value and entertainment, morbid curiosity, the inescapable voyeurism of human nature.

We’ve always loved a freakshow.

It’s easy to get sucked into spirals of despair, to become fear-struck by the suggestion that pretty soon all of America will be living inside the Manosphere, obsessed with looksmaxxing and raw milk and wailing about hypergamy and Low T. These are men who are terrified of social irrelevance and seed oils, and they can’t even figure out which one of those things is the bigger threat. These are not men with adult-level critical reasoning skills.

Also, consider this: For every man who spent Father’s Day weekend at Freedom Con engaging in “raw competitions that punish weakness,” there were millions of men at home engaging with their actual families just being—you know—fathers.

For every man who attended the session on how to “reject woke secular gay paganism” (not making this up), there were millions of men at home watching TV and mowing their lawns.

For every Freedom Con-er navigating obstacle courses that someone set up for them as though they’re children, there were millions of men navigating the demands of parenting in healthy, two income-households.

For every red-pilled moron who went to this thing to practice tire-changing, there were millions of men at home who changed a tire simply because it needed to be changed.

For every attendee at this Trump-loving, chest-beating stupidfest practicing his lassoing for cattle-wrangling (also a real activity at this thing), there were millions of men at home wrangling toddlers into bed and making sure their dogs were fed.

(What percentage of the male population needs to know how to LASSO things in 2026? [Note: this is not an indictment of lassoing or the profession of cattle ranching. I’m just saying these guys are not cattle ranchers. I imagine actual cattle ranchers would find their “lasso practice” hilarious.])

For every wingnut man-child losing his mind listening to “original verse from a pastor and tactical gear salesman known as the Warrior Poet” (also an actual feature of this event), there were millions of men at home listening to Spotify while washing the dishes.

People are fascinated by these Freedom Con men for the same reasons social-media is fascinated by their financially-submissive and home-birth-obsessed tradwives, and those women’s realities are as outlier as their wackadoodle husbands’:

For every woman churning artisanal butter in a vintage dress she bought with her allowance, there are millions of women grabbing the butter at the grocery or the bodega on their way home from the normal jobs that grant them financial autonomy and the ability to make healthy decisions for themselves and their families.

For every young woman suddenly donning a chapel veil in the name of humbling herself before man and God, there are millions of young progressive Catholics working together to feed the hungry and liberate the oppressed and increase inclusivity in their church.

For every woman who paid to be a volunteer at Freedom Con (you read that correctly), there are millions of women mocking it online in platforms like mine.

But again, these are just normal things: women going to work and stopping to pick up dinner and volunteering for actual causes and talking to one another. None of it is as fascinating as watching he-men practice their planks in a fitness-based circle jerk in rural Washington, I guess.

We have to stop taking any of this seriously. The media will keep covering it, I’m sure, but part of that coverage needs to be more explicit about how extremely niche, extremely stupid, and extremely hilarious it all is.

We need MORE MOCKING, and I say that with all the seriousness in the world

Note to readers: I’ve never done this before, but I’m about to turn a Facebook group member’s post into a Substack article. Here’s why: What she’s doing is, in a literary sense, a “comparative analysis.”

Here’s a quick IG video explaining the value of comparative analyses, but in simple terms it means to analyze one text within the context of another (or multiple others).

In the case of the post below, this community member is analyzing one “text”—this man’s manipulative words and physical aggressions (which I’m considering part of the “text,” as it’s an instantiation of embodied rhetoric [and also technically sexual assault])—within the context of Burn the Haystack. And she’s doing it brilliantly.

This is how the best comparative analyses are written; they use one text (my book in this case) to explicate another (this man’s words and actions) in a way that sheds new light/offers a different perspective on the new text being analyzed (e.g. it’s not actually just “boys being boys”; it’s extreme toxicity that signals danger on the horizon).

This woman’s ability to perform such an insightful analysis saved her, and she is in turn sharing it to save other women. What I just described is the best possible outcome of my book and this community. After the divider line I’m about to paste in, all words are hers, not mine:

Hello to all my fellow haystack burners!

I’d like to share how BHDM helped me torch a loser who would’ve caused me a lot of pain, in the hopes that this might help others, as well. [Trigger warning: aggressive sexual behavior].

I met “Tim” (not his real name) years ago through a shared interest. He seemed to be a kind and interesting person. He recently asked me out for dinner, and I agreed.

On this first date, he bluntly told me I don’t have the qualities necessary for success in my career field (leadership). He also criticized women generally, stating we always expect men to serve us.

Not yet having read Dr. Young’s book, I explained these away to myself as the result of some “trauma” in his past. ‘Poor guy,’ I thought. ‘I’ll show him what real kindness is, and in return he’ll become the gentle person I know he is, deep down.’

At the end of this date, he invited me to his house to meet his “kitties.” I agreed, because I’d known him for years and thought he was a trustworthy friend.

“Let’s cuddle on the couch,” he said once I arrived. Instead, he quickly and aggressively groped me. I winced and moved his hand away. ‘Well, boys will be boys,’ I thought to myself, rattled.

He invited me to return to his house the following weekend to have coffee and watch his “kitties” play outside. I hesitantly agreed.

When I arrived, he again invited me to “cuddle” on his couch. Again, he quickly groped me, violating the boundary I’d previously set.

I once more explained this away. ‘Men will always try to get as much as they can,’ I told myself soothingly.

A few days later, he texted that he’d like me to become his TV “buddy.” He said he’d send me a list of his favorite shows, and arrange an evening for me to come to his house. I felt apprehensive, but agreed.

Reading news sites that evening, I came across an article about Dr. Young’s book in “The Guardian.” I was fascinated. I immediately ordered it, and voraciously inhaled it as soon as it arrived. ‘Holy moly,’ I thought. ‘This is exactly what I need.’

I applied Dr. Young’s teachings to my interactions with Tim. I was astounded by what I could now clearly see:

1. He tried to undermine my confidence in my career, and denigrated women in general, to destroy my self-confidence and make me more pliable, vulnerable, and likely to accept bad treatment.

2. He manipulatively used terms evoking childhood and comfort (”kitty,” “cuddle,” “buddy”) to make me drop my guard and confusedly accept what he really intended (casual, abusive sex).

3. He aggressively and repeatedly violated my physical boundaries to weaken my defenses, making me more prone to accept future mistreatment.

As promised, he later texted me a list of his favorite TV shows. He asked if I was free the next evening, or another evening that week, for “TV buddy” time at his house.

When I didn’t immediately reply, he texted again: “You can also say if you’re not interested, and if you are, Thursday is ideal.”

‘Wow, two directives in one sentence,’ I thought. ‘Astonishingly toxic.’

Armed with the new knowledge, I calmly replied, “Yeah no, this isn’t going to happen. Have a nice life.” I then immediately blocked him.

In the past, I might’ve explained to him, patiently and in detail, exactly how and why his behavior made me stop wanting to see him.

But now I’ve read “Burn the Haystack”? No frickin’ way. Why would I train him how to more-successfully exploit the next woman unlucky enough to cross his path?

Thanks to BHDM, I torched a real loser who would’ve hurt me badly, after only two dates, and before he did any lasting damage to me.

My goal now is to ditch the next dud after only one date. With practice, I hope to thin-slice my first interaction with any clunkers, and torch them right then and there.

I also vowed to never again visit a man’s house (or get in his car, or go hiking with him, or be alone with him in any way) until I’m completely certain he’s entirely harmless to me. We cannot play it too safe with them.

So a *gigantic* thank you to Dr. Young, and a very happy haystack burning to you all!

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” - Plutarch

Dear Men,

I have read your responses to the group membership request questions. I understand that you’re “just here to learn” and that you “just want to see what this whole method is about” and, my favorite, that you’re “just here to offer the male perspective.”

I have read—more times than I can count—that you are “nonbinary closeted,” and you are apparently so deeply closeted that when I click on your profiles you are decked out in MAGA hats and wailing about other people’s vaccinations and beating your chests over all the women who have disrespected you. You are holding forth about masculine energy and the impending threat of seed oils.

And I have witnessed you bragging on Instagram and preaching from the pulpits of Reddit about how you’ve already infiltrated Burned Haystack (I love that you’re using the verb “infiltrate.” That’s very dramatic). You’re apparently buying fake Facebook profiles and changing your profile names from “Nick” to “Nic” or “Nate” to “Nat” (actual example from last week, and the fact that you are a PSYCHOLOGIST, Nat(e), is super disturbing and highly ethically questionable).

You guys who do these things: You keep revealing yourselves in three specific ways, and they’re super distinct and recognizable. The predictability is humorous to the group. So anyway, we do know. We just don’t care. As long as you don’t talk, you won’t bother us, and when you do talk and bother us, we’ll remove you.

Further comedy: Those of you sneaking into the Burned Haystack community seem to believe that it’s a game-able system—that you’ll be able to crack it and uncover some super-secret box of magic tricks that will empower you to get women melting at your feet into puddles of liquid internalized misogyny so caustic it disintegrates us into the compliant, brainless, fawning tradwives you’re all apparently clamoring to find.

Here’s what’s actually going to happen if you manage to sneak in:

The secret code you’re planning to access is simply . . . Feminism. It’s the exact same form of feminism that already exists in every single textbook, TEDtalk, political rally, and public platform.

People ask me all the time if I’m worried my book is going to “clue men into the system” or “teach them the game.”

There never was a game, unless the game was basic human decency, unless it was seeing women as three-dimensional beings worthy of equal consideration, unless it was shutting up for five whole seconds to listen to a voice other than your own.

Joining Burned Haystack is always disappointing for you guys, and we’re sorry. 😢🎻

You’ve had access to all the theory all along; you’ve just never listened or learned, and that’s why you can’t get dates. You’ve been too busy researching chemtrails or something.

So the real question, I guess, is whether I’m concerned toxic men are going to “learn feminism.”

I mean, no. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to fear that that’s going to happen. These are men who can’t learn to work Hinge, apparently, since they “aren’t that great at checking this app” or “don’t understand why the app won’t let them change it,” in which “it” refers to their age being ten years younger than they actually are. It’s weird that the app never gets their age wrong ten years in the other direction. It’s all very mysterious.

But what about the men who have managed to infiltrate? The men who are sitting in our private women’s community right now flying under everyone’s radar?

Well, 99% of you will reveal yourselves pretty quickly, at which point we’ll jettison you; the slim minority who “trick” us—who are so good at faking feminism that NO ONE ever suspects you, well: I guess it doesn’t make any difference to us, right?

Let’s use an analogy here: I’m a 5’ 1” woman with zero athletic ability or knowledge of any kind of sport whatsoever. But let’s say I for some reason am able to get so good at basketball that I get drafted by the WNBA and lead my team to the championship game? Am I “faking” basketball? Have I “infiltrated” the WNBA? Or am I just really good at basketball now? And does it matter?

So that’s what I’m saying: if you’re “embedded” (another term you like to use) and participating so effectively that no one detects you, then you might just be . . . a feminist. I realize that’s probably scary. You’re at least pragmatically a feminist, because at this point you’re lending your energy and your voice to the advancement of a feminist mission. Thank you.

It’s okay to take an alternate path. So whether you’re serving as counterexamples of whom to date (your guys’ profiles were a HUGE help in writing my book) or legitimately accidentally un-red-pilling yourselves by hanging out in Burned Haystack, you’re providing a tangible social benefit, regardless of whether or not you can get dates.

I just thought that might make you feel better.

~Jennie

In my deep-dive study of online resources addressing “the ick” (you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here), I purposely sought sources that I would consider credible.

As a native Clevelander and someone who’s benefitted from the Cleveland Clinic (always among the top-rated hospitals in the world), I was happy to find this article on the ick published by that institution. When I read it, though, I was horrified.

Here are a few super-problematic lines (bold text) with my “talking back to” responses following:

“An ‘ick’ is a form of projection based on cognitive bias and shouldn’t be confused as a dealbreaker.”

OR, an ick might not be projection based on cognitive bias at all. It might be your trustworthy intuition based on eons of human evolution and decades of direct personal experience. It’s not that you—a silly silly woman—are “confusing it as a dealbreaker”; it’s that it should, in fact, be a dealbreaker, and on some deep reptilian level you already know it.

It’s not projection; it’s protection.

“Icks could also happen for a ton of other reasons,” explains Dr. Childs. “Maybe the relationship is going too fast or maybe you have reservations, so you pick something you don’t like about the person that gives you permission to not be in the relationship.”

Frequently, when women say the relationship is “going too fast,” what they are expressing is that their boundaries are being violated, their words are dismissed, and their body language is being ignored. These experiences are red-hot flags of toxicity and reside in a separate universe from women “picking something we don’t like” in order to “give us permission” to not be in the relationship.

This should not need to be stated, but women don’t need permission to not be in a relationship. Ever.

“Icks give you a reason to end it without having to hold yourself accountable,” she adds.

Yet another phrasing that unsubtly suggests women must not only “have a reason” (who vets this reason? There’s an implied paternalism here) but “hold ourselves accountable” for ending a relationship.

The assumptions here are misogynistic and offensive and serve to position women as obligated to remain with men who make us uncomfortable, as though there’s some tacit societal mandate to remain in relationship unless you can “prove” your way out, presumably through something that this mysterious vetting authority deems “more serious than an ick.”

How serious does it have to be? Does she have to be demonstrably abused? Is that how she gets to earn her freedom in a way that releases her from accountability?

“Putting too much weight on icks could disrupt a relationship, especially before it has a solid chance of getting started.”

Exactly. And also before she ends up exploited, violated, neglected, etc. There are many relationships that should never be granted a solid chance of getting started. Women listening to our icks is one of the most reliable ways to cut those relationships off before they hurt us.

“We often put people on the chopping block because we put too much weight on icks,” she continues. “How would you feel if you’re being given one chance on a first date and you’re automatically cut off because you didn’t wipe your mouth right or you didn’t use the right utensil? Maybe they didn’t give you a napkin or your utensils were dirty and you were forced to use what was left.”

Let’s break this one into two parts: the offensive part, and the downright moronic part:

First: There are hundreds of thousands of women in the Burned Haystack community. I’ve never heard of a single one of them cutting a man off for something like not using the right utensil. When women share their “icks,” those icks are almost always directly tied to consent violations, verbal aggression, gaslighting, and other deeply antisocial behaviors; they are not trivial displays of superficiality, as dating media loves to suggest.

The next part is downright hilarious. I love that the writer of this article (clearly Cleveland Clinic is not above hiring writers simply to “generate content”) not only invoked these crazy hypotheticals but then came up with hypothetical explanations to justify the original hypotheticals:

“Maybe they didn’t give you a napkin” [who, the restaurant???] or “your utensils were dirty and you were forced to use what was left” [are there people forcing men to use “leftover utensils”???]

Do you see what happened there? Someone is suggesting it’s MORE LIKELY that men are being “forced” to use dirty utensils than it is that women are getting the ick from them for totally valid reasons.

“If you’re looking to strengthen your stomach and power through the ick factor, there are a few things Dr. Childs suggests you can do to make sure these icks don’t overwhelm you in all the wrong ways:”

I feel compelled to write this final response in gigantic text:

If you have to “strengthen your stomach” to be with a man, YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY NOT BE WITH HIM; you don’t even need to think about it. That’s not “an ick”; that’s physical revulsion, and the very mention that you should “power through it” is egregiously offensive.

Okay, I’m done now. Please share your thoughts in the comments ⬇️