I was at a sauna with two new friends from my writing class. As we wrapped ourselves in towels and walked into the sauna, Claire elbowed Gia, widening her eyes toward a tan, blonde, tattooed man on the highest bench.

“That was the guy I was telling you about.”

I raised an eyebrow. “An ex?”

Claire looked almost indignant. “Oh my God, no.” She lowered her voice. “His name is Quinn. When I broke up with my ex, he was the first person I slept with. Honestly, best head I’d gotten in years.”

She looked at Gia, fresh off a two-year relationship, with the unmistakable look of a woman making a referral.

I watched Gia assess Quinn’s tattoos and chiseled physique with mild interest before Claire added, “Just don’t expect him to cuddle after or anything. He was kinda mean and low-key a misogynist. But other than that? Ten out of ten.”

Gia shrugged and looked at me, tilting her head toward Quinn, whose arms and legs were spread wide across the sauna bench like the splayed fuckboy he was.

“Would you sleep with him?”

I looked at Quinn, then back at Gia. “I didn’t sleep with men like that.”

Claire looked surprised. “Hot and good at sex?”

I shrugged. “Someone who would make me sad after.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “I think you just have to go into more things without expectations. You gotta just go for it without making it a thing.”

I rolled my eyes, smiling. “I’m too prone to emotional hangovers.”

Claire pushed back. “You write about sex for a living. You’re telling me you don’t go out into the field and, you know, try things out?”

I shook my head and let the conversation move on. What I didn’t explain was that my rules around sex came from the same place as my rules around food: ten years of learning what my body could take, beginning in an eating disorder clinic.

10 years ago

I sat in a blue sloped plastic chair with six other girls, all sharp bones and pale faces. The smell of fried chicken and gravy from across the room made my mouth water, the savory aroma at odds with the sterile uniformity of the cafeteria.

“I know takeout day can bring up a lot,” our attendant said as the staff assembled our plates. “But facing fear foods is part of recovery. You wouldn’t eat this every day, but everything is healthy in moderation.”

Across the table, another patient caught my eye and mouthed, “Kill me.”

Kill me indeed, I thought as an arm loomed over my head and deposited a plate in front of me: a heavy mound of mashed potatoes sagging under beige gravy, fried chicken with oil shining in the cracks of its crust, green beans slick with butter, and a pale dinner roll already going soggy where it touched the gravy.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the girl next to me muttered.

I looked at her pointedly, a small gesture to say: Look, none of us want to do this either.

As our allotted half hour began, I halfheartedly took a spoonful of gravy-soaked mashed potatoes. They were warm and savory, dissolving on my tongue. But when I closed my eyes, I was mentally dissecting my plate, imagining all the oil hidden in the chicken, potatoes, green beans liquefied and poured into a glass for my viewing displeasure.

A hand tapped my shoulder. It was the attendant.

“Tova, if you don’t finish your plate, we’re going to have to give you an Ensure.”

Ensure: the chalky, chocolate-milk-adjacent sludge seemingly designed for two demographics: elderly people with soft gummy mouths and insolent teenage girls in eating disorder clinics.

That night I laid on my inpatient bed, unable to find a position where my stomach didn’t feel swollen and oily. It felt like the entire path from my mouth to my stomach had been shellacked in grease, and I fantasized about squeezing a lemon straight down my throat to cut through it.

Too uncomfortable to sleep, I walked barefoot to the window overlooking the parking lot. Desperate for air, I tugged at it a few times before realizing the clinic had locked it, presumably so none of us could hurl our immaculate little bodies over the edge.

Instead, I pressed my face to the cold glass and stared at the full moon, replaying group therapy. During my mandatory share, I’d complained about how heavy and lethargic dinner made me feel.

The therapist nodded thoughtfully. “I’d get curious about whether ‘heavy’ is a physical sensation or a judgment you’ve learned to assign to certain foods.”

I went back to bed, slept like shit, and woke up feeling not just heavy but exhausted.

This was what they taught me in recovery: that shame could ruin moments worth having. They warned us that becoming too preoccupied with being “healthy” could isolate us, overcorrecting one disorder into orthorexia where the pursuit of eating “clean” became its own rigid obsession. “You don’t want to be the friend who can’t go out to a restaurant or the girl who can’t have a slice of birthday cake.”

So the first stage of my recovery was about reclaiming those small moments. In my late teens, I didn’t just push myself to eat birthday cake and greasy bags of fries; I pushed myself toward all the coming-of-age rites my illness had taken from me. My first kiss, my first drink, my first time giving and receiving oral sex all happened within a short period. It was my fuck-you to anorexia, a reclamation of every moment I felt I’d robbed from myself.

Though, as I’d come to find out, this making up for lost time would soon overcorrect into alcoholism. Drunk at 4 a.m. in my college dorm, I’d curl into a fetal position as my buzz turned to a sickening pulse, reassuring myself that this was what it meant to be young: you got wasted, fucked around and went to class hungover.

By my early twenties, my ass was planted in an AA meeting after what felt like my millionth relapse. I’d already made the regrettable yet classic mistake of sleeping with my married 37-year-old sponsor, so I was onto a new one: an 80-year-old retired librarian with a thick Queens accent whom I would never be tempted to fuck.

At my first meeting back, I walked into a church with a cup of coffee and lowered myself into a squeaky metal folding chair. I’d arrived late to a speaker meeting, but it wasn’t the forty-something mother of two at the podium who caught my attention. It was the dark-haired, blue-eyed man sitting across from me.

After the meeting, we shared a cigarette. He told me he’d moved to New York to become a musician, texted me a flyer for his next show, and I spent the week counting down the days until I could see him again.

That weekend, pressed against the back exit of a dive bar, he whispered that he thought I was cute but couldn’t get into anything right now. “Me too,” I’d whispered back, while secretly hoping he’d reconsider.

We only kissed that night, but when he texted the next morning asking me to come over, I could barely focus at work, drunk on the novelty of being desired and the anticipation of sleeping with a hot stranger.

In his one-bedroom apartment that night, I was so focused on being what he wanted, being desirable enough to earn a second audition that I did whatever I thought would get me one. My moans bounced off his low ceilings as he entered me, though the sex itself, a rhythmic thrusting without eye contact, was only mildly pleasurable.

On the subway home, I kept checking my phone, though, by the end of the 45-minute ride, that familiar ache had started pooling in my stomach, the particular female intuition of knowing a man who’d just been inside you will never speak to you again.

Once home, I didn’t bother taking off my shoes or makeup before collapsing face-down onto the twin mattress. I opened Tinder, though the sight of three men in the same backwards baseball hat made me nauseous, so I impulsively called my sponsor.

“You’re calling a senior citizen at midnight. This better be good.”

I cringed. “Sorry, Marge. I’ll call tomorrow.”

“No, no, I’m fucking awake now. Let’s hear it.”

I immediately regretted calling. “It’s just…I…”

Marge sighed. “Tovala, I’m gonna need you to skip to the part where something happens.”

And then it all came out: I’d slept with yet another guy in AA, and once again my entire life had ground to a halt while I waited for a text from a man who wouldn’t know if I got hit by a bus.

Marge listened patiently, and when I finished, I braced for her to tell me I was being stupid, childish, overly boy-obsessed but instead, she cleared her throat.

“Did I tell you I had cancer eight years ago?”

“No… you did not.”

“Breast cancer. Wiped my fucking kishkes.”

“I’m guessing you’re in remission?”

“Sure, but that’s not the point. For months after my diagnosis, I ate cake for breakfast every day. I thought, fuck it, I’m going to die and I like a fat slice of grocery store cake. So I ate the fucking cake.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Sure, In theory. But I’m an old person with an Ashkenazi stomach and unstable blood sugar. Every morning I’d spike the shit out of my blood sugar and feel miserable all day, because that’s what fucking happens when you start your morning with a million grams of sugar.”

I had absolutely no idea where she was going with this, but eventually, Marge landed the plane.

“This piece-of-shit guy is your breakfast cake. He’s a moment that makes the rest of your day feel like fucking garbage. And when you get to my age, after you’ve done the career and the marriage and the friendships, what you have left are days. So if you keep waking up and realizing something has already ruined yours, maybe listen.”

And suddenly I was back in that clinic bed after the fried chicken dinner, swollen and miserable, realizing how often I’d confused making myself feel like shit with being alive: greasy food with living in the moment, vodka sodas with youth, casual sex with some necessary rite of passage.

Before we hung up, I had one last question.

“So what do you eat for breakfast now?”

Marge laughed. “What a great fucking question.”

“So?”

“I eat a whole avocado. Both sides. Meyer lemon, and that flaky salt Anthony Bourdain liked.” She sounded suddenly energized. “The bodega by me charges six fucking dollars an avocado. I buy seven at a time. At this point I could’ve bought property.”

She laughed, said a quick goodbye, and hung up.

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I don’t eat fried food, even on special occasions. I don’t have sex unless I’m dating someone and I don’t drink, even for a toast.

Marge died a year ago. On her birthday last week, I walked to the bodega and bought a seven-dollar avocado (Marge would’ve lost her fucking mind). I ate the whole thing for breakfast with Meyer lemon and the flaky sea salt Anthony Bourdain used to like.

I still think about her often.

I think of Marge when I’m standing in my kitchen at 1 a.m. craving spoonfuls of Betty Crocker frosting, or when I’m emotionally flatlining on Hinge and considering calling the boy who doesn’t love me. She crosses my mind in airport lounges when I want a dirty martini, and again at the bodega when I see my favorite cigarettes (light blue American Spirits) and imagine taking up smoking again.

Because I’ve never stopped fantasizing about giving myself over to those tiny impulses and letting tomorrow pay for them. But when I wake up the next morning, the only thing that feels better than a fresh tomorrow, knowing, with absolute certainty…

that Marge would have been proud.

Vampire smut was playing through my AirPods as I passed the consignment/pickle store on Wythe and Second. Two postgrads in low-rise jeans, clutching bell hooks, passed me, and over a borderline rape scene, I heard my name.

She had light blue eyes and dark brown hair and was speaking excitedly before the gap between us had even closed. “I don’t know if Devon mentioned me,” she said, “but I’m Georgia. You RSVP’d to my house party, but I think you couldn’t make it.”

I strained my face into a smile. “No, sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember.” Why are you being a bitch?

Watching her face fall, I scrambled. “Thanks for saying hi.” Why am I being so fucking cagey?

Here’s the thing… I knew exactly why.

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3 Months Earlier:

Wedged between the fake mudroom Dalis, a sign in oversized Helvetica read, “What’s Your Style of Tiktok Autism?”

“Okay,” Devon said. “Remember, it’s either a nice Asian or a mean Slavic, just so long as they’re hot.”

I took a long, slow breath and counted to five before smiling and gently reminding him not to sort women into Pornhub categories.

Naturally, the first thing partygoers encountered was a table covered in laminated cards, where an attendant told us to write our names and select our preferred flavor of latent autism.

Has one cup that makes water taste correct.

One minor schedule change from becoming nonverbal.

Nice choice, a tall blonde man said over my shoulder, as I selected: Can taste when they changed the packaging but Before I could respond, Devon clapped him on the shoulder. Tova, Ryan. Ryan, Tova. Then he gestured over the pool of heads bobbing beneath the chandelier. He shot me a wink. Ryan is the host.

And a practiced one, I could tell, when almost mechanically he asked how Devon and I knew each other. I laughed. I told him we’d been set up by a mutual friend and after that Devon had decided to record and analyze our date from an AI device hanging from his neck. I decided his particular flavor of neurodivergence was better suited to friendship and we’d been wingmanning each other ever since.

Damn, Ryan said, “autistic enough to record your dates” would’ve been such a good card.

“More like autistic enough to stay single for the rest of my life.”

Ryan shook his head. “I don’t get it, you know a ton of hot women. What about that smokeshow tech girl you brought to my last party?”

“Georgia?” He puffed out his cheeks. “Oh, I wish.”

Ryan laughed. “A girl like that probably doesn’t stay single long.”

“She doesn’t,” Devon said. “Someone snatches her up every time she is.”

I looked between them. “Who’s Georgia?”

Ryan raised an eyebrow. “She’s basically a dating-pool unicorn: perfect age, supermodel hot, but also runs a multimillion-dollar tech company.”

He turned to Devon. “If she’s ever single again, you better call dibs.”

Devon shook his head. “No way, dude. I a hundred percent call dibs.”

“Then don’t fumble it, homie, you can tell she’s used to like Michelin-star dinners, so don’t do that coffee date bullshit.”

The conversation got significant less interesting as the topic pivoted from Georgia to some software company they both used and I wandered off, letting a variety of tech founders mansplain generative AI to me until my dissociative state got the better of me and I called it a night

It wasn’t until later, when I scrolled stomach-down on my bed, that I noticed a DM from Ryan.

It was really nice meeting you. I’d love to get to know you more.

A current of excitement moved through me and I texted back immediately.

I’m free Thursday. There’s a late-night tea house we could go to if you’re down?

His response came almost immediately.

I was thinking we just chill at my place. I’ll get a bottle of wine and you can swing by around 9:30?

Do you mind if we meet somewhere outside?

I mean sure but in that case lets just try another night.

I closed my eyes, flashing back to when I pressed my knees into the floor in the back of my high school gym, giving head to Ben, my cute high school crush. I didn’t mind that he didn’t reciprocate, I only asked for one thing months into our secret little arrangement, “Can you take me to the next school dance?” He’d looked away saying he’d had to go and it was the last time we talked. Later when I’d confronted him prom, begging him to tell me why he’d brought another girl his vodka laced breath had gone hot in my ear, “because Tova, some girls are pretty enough to date and some are only pretty enough to fuck.”

Ben’s subtext was as gutting as Ryan’s but because slashing my wrist would’ve been too 2010’s, I decided to self harm the cosmopolitan way. I opened another tab, and I searched for Georgia.

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Her Medium article described a 24-year old with a medical technology company and Georgia’s trials involving Alzheimer’s patients. I tore through it all before scrolling back up and zooming in on her poreless headshot.

After tossing my phone face down on my bed, my studio was plunged into darkness and though I tried to gather it I couldn’t summon the disdain to hate this altruistic, hot Elizabeth Holmes. That said, I had no appetite to meet her. So when Devon suggested I meet Georgia, I declined. And when he later marked me down as his plus-one to her house party, I found a reason not to go.

But now she was standing right in front of me on a Williamsburg sidewalk, her radiant face slipping into that universal girl expression of why does this woman I’ve never met seem to hate me? And though part of me wanted to walk away, watching her face fall triggered something compulsive in me.

“I’m sorry. I do know who you are…”

Behind the paywall is how I kind of had a mental breakdown in front of Georgia, and how she turned it into something genuinely transformative.

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I recently wrote a piece that reached a way bigger audience than I was expecting. It was about Ariana Grande’s extreme thinness and, as someone who struggled with anorexia, I could see where her behaviors were coming from because I’d exhibited many of those same behaviors in the past.

For context, when I’m writing something (especially an analytical piece), I become demonically insufferable. I’m not really one to “sit with an idea.” Rather, I hold everyone in my life hostage while I verbally process it. My hairdresser got the thesis, my “Brunch Girlies” group chat got basically a dissertation, and my therapist read the first draft. All this to say: No one was safe.

In the days leading up to the Ariana piece, my brother fundamentally reached a breaking point. As we roamed the isles of Fairway, to pick out a cake for my dad’s birthday he screamed:

“TOVA, I COULD NOT GIVE LESS OF A SHIT ABOUT ARIANA GRANDE’S GAPING MOTHER WOUND. I JUST NEED YOU TO TELL ME: CHOCOLATE OR FUCKING VANILLA?”

My friends and family have slowly become accustomed to the fact that my writing topics become temporary obsessions and they deal with it because they love me. My iPhone, however (the ever-attentive Big Brother in my pocket) enables the shit out of any cultural fixation I find. Which is perhaps why the second I published my own piece about anorexia culture, my algorithm essentially went, Sick. So this is what we’re doing now, and began showing me almost exclusively malnourished celebrities.

My feed was soon flooded with pictures of 23-year-old Jenna Ortega, her recent weight loss making her already-thin body look so frail that the photos were difficult to look at. What was even more painful to watch was the way the internet descended on her, pointing out her sunken face and exposed arms like vultures picking at a carcass.

But it wasn’t the images that bothered me most; it was the callousness of the commenters as they insisted, almost manically, that Jenna Ortega was on Ozempic. It was as though her use of the fashionable weight-loss drug somehow absolved them of having to empathize with someone who looked on the brink of physical collapse.

I’m not saying I think Jenna Ortega is an appropriate candidate for a GLP-1—that’d be fucking crazy. But here’s the thing: even if she did use a weight-loss drug to get there, attacking her over her speculated use of one is wildly problematic for reasons I’ll get into below.

GLP-1s suppress appetite, so, yeah, they make weight loss easier. But half my friends are on them, and very few have become as thin. For some, the medication has been genuinely life-changing.

At my last AA meeting, I had a heartwarming conversation with a woman who struggled not just with alcoholism but with binge eating as well. Going on a GLP-1 helped with more than her desire to snack all day; it helped with her drinking as well. As someone in AA, I know how fucking hard it is to get sober, especially if you have an eating disorder, so hearing that someone had found a medication that made her life even a little bit easier felt kind of incredible.

I felt the same way when my best friend finally found an antidepressant that worked. Not only was I like, “More power to you,” I was happy for her because finding a drug that works for you doesn’t have any reflection on who you are as a person. It’s not “cheating.” It’s needing a tool to help make your life easier and finding one.

Okay, some people are misusing a pharmaceutical tool… big whoop. People misuse pharmaceuticals all the time. Why is this different? And furthermore, why are we judging the value of a medication by the people who abuse it?

If you’re already thin, a GLP-1 can make you drop an extra ten pounds so you look visibly emaciated. But you know what it can’t create? The desire that makes a woman want to do that to herself. Women in Hollywood are smiling in couture while they are dying in front of us. And I don’t care about the tools she used to get there; I wonder about the mental illness that seeded it in the first place.

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As someone who spent half a decade cooking for celebrities-

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Recently, a Nantucket shop owner, John Sylvia, put up a “No Influencers” sign, which is objectively funny anywhere, but especially on Nantucket, where the whaling industry died so the white-girl content industrial complex could inherit the island.

But by all accounts no one really gave a shit about the no influencers sign until Influencer Paige Lorenze criticized it for being “anti-feminist.”

For reference, Paige Lorenze is a lifestyle influencer. She grew up in Connecticut with the kind of wealth that affords boarding school, luxury vacations, and Aspen ski trips. She first became notorious for dating Armie Hammer (yea, the celebrity with the cannibal fetish) and Morgan Wallen, a country singer whose discography would suggest he was untouched by third-wave feminism.

Paige now runs a “successful” fast-fashion clothing brand (Dairy Boy) while magically remaining committed to what she calls her “soft feminine” outlook on life.

The “soft” part is of course, largely reserved for Paige, because, well… she’s the one selling the lifestyle. The actual machinery required to produce it—manufacturing, fulfillment, assistants, photographers, social media teams, and the invisible labor required to keep a woman looking effortlessly barefoot in a field—is politely edited out.

Which is exactly what John Sylvia was commenting on when he put the sign up. It wasn’t even a commentary on Nantucket locals becoming set dressing for the wealthy on vacation. In the interviews he’s done since, Sylvia doesn’t even complain about influencers as a whole. He simply talks about influencers coming into his shop so absorbed with themselves they can’t be bothered to exchange basic pleasantries with him or his staff.

The sign wasn’t just a lighthearted boundary. It was saying: Hey, I understand Nantucket is part of your aesthetic, but it’s also my home. You don’t get to turn my life into the background of your instagram carousel and then crop my humanity out of frame.

So when Paige described the sign as anti-feminist mockery, treating the message like it was some type of segregation-era discrimination, she went from defending influencers to apparently leading their civil rights movement. And unfortunately Paige, “the Rosa Parks of wealthy white women,” did not resonate with a large swath of the internet.

Because most people don’t recognize themselves in Paige’s reality. They recognize themselves in Sylvia. Paige sells the 99 percent a fantasy and invites them to imagine themselves inside it. But the moment she turns her frustration on a service worker, the illusion breaks because it reminds her audience that they aren’t they aren’t the people the dream was built for; they’re the people required to maintain it.

So no, I don’t think influencers like Paige are an oppressed class. In fact, as someone who worked as a domestic worker in the Hamptons (America’s most famous and arguably most Caucasian vacation destination) I remember being viscerally furious when the content creator Meredith from Wishbone Kitchen started going viral for her private chef “day in the life” videos.

I would watch her trips to Round Swamp Farm where she’d spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on groceries—$15 cauliflowers, $20 pints of strawberries—then return to a spectacular Hamptons kitchen. It wasn’t quite Nara Smith making Cocoa Puffs from scratch in Schiaparelli, but it performed the same magic trick: making domestic labor look like something beautiful women do recreationally between lymphatic drainage appointments.

Like Meredith, I am a white woman from a cul-de-sac. Like Meredith, I had lovely parents who paid for culinary school. And like Meredith, I arrived in the Hamptons with an enormous professional advantage. Meredith and I could command absurd rates to cook in Hamptons kitchens while the domestic workers around us earned a fraction of what we did. In the Hamptons, where an estimated 80 percent of the domestic workforce is Latina, the disparity was disturbing and impossible to ignore. Part of my horror in watching Meredith’s content came from realizing just how differently we had interpreted the same experience.

I stopped working in the Hamptons partly because the whole ecosystem felt like a regression to the 1950s but Meredith packaged that same environment as aspirational lifestyle content. I will tell anyone who asks about the blatant racial inequalities of domestic work I witnessed there, while Meredith does exactly what influencers like Paige do: she keeps the fantasy intact and anyone who complicates it out of sight.

People like Paige or Merdith had me believing influencers would always be a class of people I’d hate, but then something strange happened. I actually became one.

While Meredith built a career making private cheffing look comfortable, I left determined to write about everything that had made it uncomfortable. The result was Raw in the Middle, a 350-page unfiltered exposé I wrote about my celebrity private-cheffing career and all the juicy gossip that came with it.

I figured that if people wanted to hear about Meredith’s life as a private chef, they’d definitely want to hear my much juicier version of it. But when I went to publishers, they explained that Meredith didn’t get a book deal because her story was particularly interesting, she got one because she had an audience. So I started posting every day until eventually (and ironically) I became an influencer, too.

The more visible I became, the harder it was to get hired as a private chef, so I had no choice but to figure out how to monetize the platform I’d built. I wanted to do it ethically, but the deeper I got into trying to monetize my platform, the more I understood Meredith’s world.

What you get behind The Paywall

• The brand meeting that completely changed how I see influencer culture

• Why certain creators are so much easier for corporations to monetize

• Why hating individual influencers lets corporations off the hook

• How I’m trapped in the same system I’m criticizing and why I think we’re blaming the product instead of the factory...

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I’ve watched Ariana Grande grow smaller with a perverse sense of nostalgia. I was thirteen when my best friend and I developed anorexia together, and I remember how quietly it took hold. When I think back to the beginning of my eating disorder, it felt almost ordinary, so mundane that it never occurred to me I was becoming sick.

Now, as my screen fills with image after image of Ariana’s increasingly skeletal frame, one memory rises above all the others.

My best friend Zoe and I lay on towels in my backyard, wearing only our newly-purchased summer bikinis, our bodies slick with baby oil as we lick the sticky, sugar-free popsicles I’d begged my mom to buy. Usually, after carpooling home from ballet, we’d peel off our leotards and go straight upstairs to do our homework. But with only three days left until 8th grade ended, we allow the heat to make us lethargic.

Zoe lowers her sunglasses to look at me, her nose crinkling.“I feel like that’s enough. Ready?”

I nod, my chest feeling that exhilarating lift the way it always does before our ritual.

We walk inside, instantly chilled by the AC. My mouth aches for cold water, but we never consume anything, not even gum before what had become the ceremony that was now etched into our muscle memory.We climb the stairs to my parents’ bathroom and lock the door. From the closet, I pull out my mother’s clear glass scale.

We never step onto it wearing anything, even the thin fabric of our bikinis will alter the results we so closely track, so we strip until we’re naked. As I assess Zoe’s bare form, I feel a strange sense of pride in how well I’ve come to know her body, the exact curve of her hip bone, and how much more pronounced it’s become.

Zoe always goes first, As she steps onto the scale, her face still flushed from the sun, she looks down at the number, then back at me. A slow smile spreads across her lips. She’s a full pound and a half lighter.

When it’s my turn, the cool glass presses against the soles of my feet. I close my eyes and take inventory of the day as though reciting a prayer: one packet of oatmeal for breakfast, ten baby carrots and a granola bar for lunch, one sugar-free popsicle, three Altoids.

I open my eyes and glance at the number on the scale before looking up at Zoe. Her smile lingers for only a beat before it slips and I know why.

I’ve lost more weight than she has.

Our game has never had rules or a winner declared aloud, but beneath our whispered confessions and shared rituals runs a silent competition. As much as Zoe loves the intimacy of our secret, she hates that I’m the one winning.

Now, I need you to stop here for a moment, because that opening wasn’t something I wrote this year. It wasn’t even something I wrote as an adult. It’s an excerpt from a pro-ana post I wrote when I was sixteen.

And if you’re uncomfortable with how romantic, even erotic, I’ve made my adolescent anorexia sound, I need you to know that’s intentional. Because I think what’s been lost in this conversation is just how seductive starvation becomes when it’s wrapped in the language of romance.

At the beginning, that’s all I was: a little girl who loved love stories. I lived on Kate Hudson rom-coms. I tore through Pride and Prejudice, convinced my life would someday feel that grand and consuming. Instead, I found boys who didn’t like me, or even worse, boys who didn’t notice me at all.

Zoe and the pro-ana websites gave me the romance I’d never found in the male gaze. Suddenly I was experiencing the very feeling Jack gave to Rose in the Titanic, the devotion to an irrational feeling at any cost. The intoxicating thrill of throwing every ounce of mental energy into a single fixation.

Looking back, I can separate myself from my illness enough to admit an uncomfortable truth: every lie I told to protect it sharpened my ability to tell a story. But if a starving sixteen-year-old could convince thousands of girls that starvation was beautiful, imagine the story an entire entertainment industry can tell when it’s invested in protecting a pop star’s eating disorder.

I know the current consensus is that we shouldn’t comment on women’s bodies. That we can’t know what someone is going through just by looking at them, but as someone who was hospitalized for malnutrition before I ever got my first kiss, I’m calling fucking bullshit.

Ariana Grande is speaking in pro-ana Morse code. And I’m going to show you exactly how she’s doing it.

Disclaimer: I am not a therapist. I’m not a mind reader, and I don’t know Ariana Grande personally. What I do know is what anorexia feels like from the inside and it begins with what I’m about to explain.

The Self-Infantilization

At the height of my illness, there was nothing I feared more than becoming a woman. I wanted to live forever on the precipice of girlhood because, more than thinness, what I craved was suspension. Each change toward puberty pulled me farther from the small, androgynous body I believed could keep me safe. I wasn’t rejecting sexuality so much as adulthood. I wanted to be desired, but only in the way our culture romanticizes girls: passive and unknowing. Becoming a woman was about having agency. A woman carries desires instead of simply provoking them, she makes choices instead of being chosen. Girlhood makes you feel passive in the gaze of others, but womanhood demands you to participate, and that terrified me

Puberty felt claustrophobic, and the closer womanhood came, the more violently I fought it. I starved away my curves, my breasts, and eventually the small amount of body fat required to maintain a menstrual cycle. By doing that, I wasn’t just delaying puberty. I was delaying womanhood itself, sexuality, adulthood, and in many ways, the male gaze.

By simply not eating, I deferred all my bigger fears. I was so hungry that I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between hunger, horniness, and exhaustion. The more disconnected I became from my body, the less responsible I felt for it, and who takes care of a body without agency?

…A parent. Anorexia rewards infant-like helplessness. As the anorexic becomes less able to function, she also becomes easier to care for. She gets to be fragile like a baby. She is fed, watched and worried over.

Long before the public conversation turned to Ariana Grande’s appearance, I recognized something unnervingly familiar in her. It wasn’t simply the weight loss. It was the softening of her voice (and even lyrics) into something far more childlike. The exaggerated, wide-eyed expressions. The tiny, apologetic posture. The almost cartoonish “Oh... who, me?” energy that seemed to shrink an undeniably accomplished adult woman back into the performance of a little girl. She built her entire identity around becoming smaller, not just physically, but psychologically. Because anorexia doesn’t just ask you to disappear. It asks you to become a child again.

Her Effusive, Teary Eyed, Overly-Emotive-Yet-Still-Heterosexual Reactions To Women:

Watching Ariana dissolve into tears throughout the Wicked press tour confused a lot of people. The way she seemed to melt into Cynthia’s presence within prolonged embraces, hand holding or just sheer adoration felt either queer coded or blatant attention seeking. But when I watched it, I saw something different.

What you get behind the paywall:

• Why anorexia can breed the kind of public fawning we saw between Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo on the Wicked press tour

• The psychology behind clothing choices that emphasize extreme thinness, and how I interpret Ariana’s

• My theory on how this may connect to the intense scrutiny surrounding her relationship with Ethan Slater

• What we can actually do in response to the grotesque media landscape that has formed around one pop star’s apparent struggle

Read more

Happy Birthday to Youuuu, everyone sang. Alice’s birthday party was in her Williamsburg penthouse and as I looked around at her gorgeous luxury apartment filled with impossibly hot 20-something influencers, I felt like I was in a movie. Just not one a casting director would’ve picked me for.

Alice was a girl I’d met at a sauna event for content creators. I’d gone hoping to make friends, though the bleach blonde, California beauty influencer was one of the last people I’d expected to click with. Alice lived in a corner of the internet I’d only observed anthropologically. She had an unironic twelve-step skincare routine, once waited in line for two hours for a dessert-themed coffee, and confidently informed me she was autistic according to Tiktok (which was why she went nonverbal when “chopped” men approached her).

When she spotted me standing alone at the influencer event, she was the one who walked over, complimented my leopard-print bikini, and asked if I wanted to try one of the event’s sponsored drinks with her.

Over prebiotic sodas, she asked what kind of content I made.

“Satire comedy.”

She tilted her head. “Can you show me?”

I found the whole exercise vaguely cringe, but I pulled up my Instagram anyway. The second she saw my profile, her eyes widened.

“Wait,” she said. “You have like... four times as many followers as me.”

The comment was so immediate and unfiltered that I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Before I could think of something polite to say, she asked her next question.

“So why do you think people follow you?”

I actually had to think about it.

“I think,” I said slowly, “people follow me because I have the vibe of someone who only got cool as an adult.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“It is,” I laughed. “Why were you um... popular in high school?”

She nodded without a second of hesitation: “I think I was the most popular girl at school,” and as though the thought just occurred to her, she continued. “I think that’s why people follow me,” she said. “Watching me makes them feel like if we met, we could be friends.”

I laughed, it was such a shamelessly honest answer that it looped back around to being charming. And honestly, I very quickly saw her point. Being Alice’s friend had the same appeal as following her online. She had a way of making you feel like, if she liked you, maybe you were cool enough to be one of the popular girls after all.

But beyond her terminally-online behavior and weaponized pretty privilege, Alice was a wonderful friend. Even though she was two years younger than I, she had the energy of an older sister. She’d drag me shopping to find clothes that actually “fit my body,” redid my makeup without asking, and had soup delivered to my house after she found out I was sick.

We also shared the same vulgar sense of humor. Which is why months later, as I held her Milk Bar birthday cake and everyone around us sang, I leaned in just enough that the friends filming on their phones couldn’t hear me.

“Blow them,” I whispered. “Like they could give you a promotion.”

She immediately burst into laughter, only composing herself long enough to blow out the candles. It was a game we’d developed together: wait for the sweetest, most wholesome moment imaginable, then say the filthiest thing that came to mind.

Later that night, Alice’s Instagram story made me do a double take. She’d somehow captured the entire interaction, from me walking toward her with the birthday cake to the exact moment I leaned in and made what was otherwise a wholesome birthday tradition into a sexual innuendo.

A few minutes later she DMed me.

Alice: Yo, everyone’s screaming over what you said.

I replied immediately.

Me: Wait... how did you get that footage?

A second later she sent me a selfie wearing a pair of translucent black Meta glasses, grinning ear to ear.

Alice: It’s the Meta glasses. Isn’t the quality amazing?

I watched the story again.

There was something strangely intimate about it. After two years of being an influencer, I had grown so used to seeing myself through a front-facing camera that I’d forgotten what I looked like when I wasn’t performing for one. In the video, I smiled, carried the cake, leaned in to make the joke, and laughed without once acknowledging a witness aside from Alice.

It reminded me of the VHS tapes my parents had of my siblings and me as kids. I’d twirl around the living room in the slightly tattered Cinderella dress I’d gotten for my sixth birthday, making up dances without a trace of self-consciousness because the camera wasn’t an audience, it was just my dad.

Watching Alice’s story, I realized how long it had been since I’d seen my face move through a series of honest, uncurated emotions. I hadn’t paused to check my angles or had any awareness of how I’d look when I replayed it later. It was refreshing.

Can you send me the recording? I messaged, and Alice sent it over almost immediately.

That was the beginning of my relationship with Meta glasses: a small technological surprise wrapped around an unexpectedly precious memory.

The shift in my relationship with them came a few weeks later.

My brother came over for coffee one morning wearing a concerned expression

“Why’d you do an interview with an alt-right influencer?”

I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Without answering, he pulled out his phone and held it up. On the screen was a Reel of me that I’d never seen before.

LIBERAL JEWISH INFLUENCER GETS DESTROYED IN LESS THAN A MINUTE.

It was a conversation I remembered.

About a month earlier, I’d been waiting outside a restaurant for a friend when a man I recognized as a conservative influencer walked over to say hello. Had we met on a debate panel or in a Jubilee-style format, I probably would’ve been guarded from the start. But this wasn’t framed as a debate. He was just another person waiting for a table.

My friend was running a few minutes late, so when he told me he recognized me and asked if I’d ever eaten there before, I answered the way I would’ve answered anyone. We talked about the restaurant, my obsession with their crispy fries and fancy deviled eggs, and whatever other small talk naturally fills five minutes between strangers.

It wasn’t until the conversation was winding down that he asked, almost casually, “Can I ask you something?”

I shrugged.

“What’s your opinion on immigration, given that you film a third of your content with a Muslim immigrant?”

Because we’d already spent several minutes making small talk, I answered honestly. I told him I generally supported immigration, believed the country benefited from it, and that people who came here legally deserved a fair opportunity to build a life.

Then his questions got more specific.

He started asking about asylum law, visa categories, deportation policy, and the practical consequences of different immigration proposals. The more he asked, the more I realized something uncomfortable: I had broad moral convictions, but I wasn’t nearly informed enough about the legal system to defend them in detail.

Finally, I smiled and held up my hands.

“I think this is where I tap out,” I said. “I’d want to do a lot more research before pretending I know enough to have this conversation.”

We shook hands, wished each other a good dinner, and I walked inside thinking it had been a surprisingly pleasant interaction.

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that, like Alice, he’d been wearing Meta glasses.

Watching the video, I recognized the same home video-like quality I’d loved in Alice’s birthday recording. But this time, my lack of self-consciousness had been folded into a narrative. The authenticity of the interaction wasn’t created to share a human moment, it’d been created to turn one person’s honest uncertainty into evidence against an entire political movement. The worst part was that, out of all the videos on his page, ours was the highest performing. It only took a cursory glance to understand why. Compared to the rest of his content, where people were clearly aware they were being filmed, our conversation came across as unusually real because I wasn’t performing for a camera. I didn’t know one was there.

I sent him a direct message.

Hey, while I enjoyed meeting you, I didn’t consent to having our conversation recorded. I’d be happy to have a planned, on-camera conversation with you in the future, but I’m going to kindly ask that you take this video down.

To his credit, he did, but the clip had already racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Even so, he took it down without question.

My issue with the video was twofold.

The first was practical. As a liberal Jewish creator whose best friend is a Muslim immigrant, our content gets stitched, reposted, and repurposed by the conservative media ecosystem all the time. I’ll spend hours writing the perfect hook for a video only to watch someone else scrape it, slap their own political framing on top of it, and build an audience—and a business—from my work. It frustrates me, but it’s also part of the bargain you make when you post publicly online.

The second issue bothered me far more, which was the particular slice of the interaction he’d chosen to publish.

Part of my platform has always been my relationship with my conservative mother because I truly believe it’s important not to cut people out of your life simply because they hold different political beliefs. If this creator had posted our entire interaction, viewers would’ve seen exactly that: two people who knew they disagreed politically having a respectful conversation out of genuine curiosity.

But that’s not the kind of story the algorithm rewards. Nuance doesn’t outperform conflict, and a respectful conversation between two people who disagreed was never going to go viral. So instead of posting the full exchange, he carved out the forty-five seconds that made me look like shit. What had been, in real life, a humbling moment of intellectual honesty became a tidy little political touchdown.

My interaction with the conservative influencer inevitably colored the way I watched Alice’s content evolve around the same technology.

Shortly after her birthday, she built an entirely new content strategy around the Meta glasses’ recording feature. She’d walk the streets of New York flirting with strangers, capturing their reactions from her point of view. It was an enormous success. Her first video got nearly twenty million views and brought in tens of thousands of new followers.

I understood the appeal immediately–a beautiful blonde woman approaching unsuspecting men was already a compelling premise, but the Meta glasses gave the videos something far more valuable than novelty: candor. The men weren’t performing for a camera because, as far as they knew, there wasn’t one. Every awkward laugh and flustered smile or polite rejection was done as if only performed to one person, and that was exactly what gave me pause.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the men on the other side of the glasses. Had they known millions of people would watch them awkwardly deflect attention or explain they had a girlfriend, would they have still agreed to be filmed?

I planned to ask Alice about the glasses when we met up at a Lower East Side cocktail bar. The bar had dark walnut walls, low amber lighting, and music just loud enough that everyone leaned in to talk while bartenders in black T-shirts moved quickly between rows of coupe glasses and oversized ice cubes. One of them was a hot bartender named Danny that I’d developed a crush on.

When Alice walked in wearing a tiny black mini skirt, a crop top, and her transparent Meta glasses, my heart sank a little.

“Would you mind not recording tonight?” I asked.

She looked horrified.

“Oh my God, no,” she laughed. “I have so much shit to talk, I wouldn’t dare.”

And for the next twenty minutes we gossiped uninterrupted, right up until Danny wandered over to ask what we wanted to drink.

“Hey, ladies,” he said as he walked over. “What can I get you?”

Alice smiled. “Well, I drink and Tova doesn’t, so I’ll take the cocktail menu, and Tova will get–” She gestured toward me, as if to say I’ll let her speak for herself.

I smiled at Danny. He smiled back. We’d flirted a handful of times before, and this night picked up exactly where the others had left off.

“I can get you anything, my dear,” he said. “Just say the word.”

“Just an island off the Amalfi Coast.”

He didn’t miss a beat.

“You’re too easy,” he said. “it’s on the house.”

I put a hand to my chest in mock offense.

“Me? Easy?”

He grinned.

“No... you’re right. That’s me.”

He winked before turning to Alice.

“And for you?”

“A lychee martini.”

As Danny reached up to the back bar for a bottle of vodka, Alice leaned toward me.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “He’s so cute. You two have such good banter.”

She reached for her phone and To my discomfort, I realized she’d recorded my entire interaction with Danny on her Meta glasses.

I felt my eyes widen. “Alice, what the fuck?” I said. “You told me you weren’t recording.”

She looked genuinely confused. “I said I wasn’t recording us talking shit about our friends,” she said. “That was just a cute interaction.” She held the phone out for me to watch it again but I gently pushed it away.

Alice frowned. “I didn’t really want to say this...”

What you get behind the paywall:

• Alice’s case about why I should be using meta glasses too.

• How I snapped and ultimately kinda lost my shit ranting about the ethics of wearable cameras and surveillance culture. (which I, in a lot of way regret)

• The point at which our friendship ultimately unraveled.

• My complicated reflections on losing Alice as a friend

*paid subscribers also get access to the audio version of this article which is my most recommended way of consuming it.

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I met “Brandon” about a month ago on Hinge and, I’ll admit it, I thought he was the one. That said, I’m delusional. I think every man I go on a first date with is the one.

But there was something about Brandon’s old school chivalry that felt genuinely novel. After sharing our numbers over Hinge, we’d done a quick FaceTime and when I admitted I had no plans that night other than eating a pint of ice cream directly from the container, he asked if he could take me out to dinner that same evening.

I rushed into my bathroom to reapply my makeup and get dressed for what had become an increasingly rare sight in New York: a man who wanted to take me to dinner on the first date. Even rarer, he offered to call me an Uber to the restaurant.

Over steaming bowls of pasta, we talked for hours. Brandon was a hedge fund quant by day and a painter by night. On our second date, he took me to the studio he rented in Williamsburg to show me his work. I asked what he listened to while he painted and discovered we had the same taste in podcasts, which somehow unraveled into a hundred other conversations before eventually ending with us making out in the middle of a sea of paint tubes, paper, and easels.

It was that night, just as the heat between us seemed to be reaching a turning point, that I looked up at him and told him I wanted to take things slow.

He smiled and told me that was completely fine.

Then, still holding me, his finger tracing slow circles along my arm, he leaned down and whispered into my ear,

“... what’s slow for you?”

I sucked in a breath. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, just one I wasn’t prepared to answer on the spot. After running my hand through his hair and kissing his neck, I leaned in just as close.

“I want to wait a couple more dates before having sex.”

Brandon raised his eyebrows with a grin. “A couple, like two?”

I laughed at the aggressively literal interpretation and cupped my hand over his mouth.

“A couple as in five.”

I couldn’t have imagined that fifth date, the one that began as magically and effortlessly as the last four, would also be our last.

To set the mood, Brandon had booked us tickets to a bathhouse and joked over text that I should pick out my tiniest bikini.

You wish, I texted back before immediately rummaging through my swimsuit drawer to find exactly that.

Brandon took my hand as we braced ourselves for the cold plunge before sprinting back to the sauna. I shrieked and laughed. Later, in the hot tub, I wrapped my legs around him and kissed him like one of those obnoxiously affectionate couples I used to roll my eyes at. But like the couples I’d always found vaguely insufferable, I’d become blissfully immune to the existence of other people. Early chemistry is a powerful anesthetic for social awareness.

We’d arrived at the bathhouse around seven, and by the time we left Brandon understandably suggested grabbing dinner. But I was so giddy, so intoxicated by the chemistry between us, that all I wanted was to go back to my apartment.

We barely made it through my front door before he scooped me into his arms. My legs wrapped around his waist as he somehow managed to walk, kiss me, and fumble us toward the bed all at once when he finally set me down, our hands were still intertwined.

Things moved faster than they normally would have, but it didn’t alarm me. In my mind, the bathhouse had been foreplay. We’d spent hours building anticipation, and now we were simply picking up where we’d left off.

But there had been a series of red flags before Brandon eventually left my apartment.

The first came when he started moving to have sex without a condom.

When I stopped him, he smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I was just going to tease you.”

Eventually he put one on, but after losing his erection, he took the condom off before leaning in to try again. That was when something inside me went cold.

“No.” It was the only word I said.

Brandon paused, then shrugged with an unsettling indifference, like he’d already mentally moved on before I had.

I felt a shock run through my body. Up until then, I’d known Brandon as a sweet hedge fund quant who spent his nights making enormous paintings. A man who’d sketched me on a napkin during our third date, overtipped waiters, and chatted with the Chinese bodega owner where he bought his coffee and rolling papers. The kind of person you collect tiny facts about in early dating because you’re trying to assemble someone from the details and then, in a matter of seconds, all of those details stopped adding up to the person sitting in front of me.

Before I knew it, he was pulling his pants off the floor.

“I’m actually pretty tired,” he said. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I replied automatically.

But the second the word left my mouth, something heavy settled in my stomach. I knew, with a strange certainty that I’d never see him again.

I waited three days hoping the unsettling feeling would fade but it didn’t and figuring I had nothing to lose I texted him.

Hey, I get that you’re not interested anymore, but the way you left things felt pretty dehumanizing.

I wasn’t a teenage girl trying to change his mind. I simply felt uncomfortable by how abruptly things had ended over something as ordinary as asking him to use a condom.

The moment I hit send, a lump caught in my throat.

The text thread, once filled with blue bubbles, had turned green.

I’d been blocked.

The heartbreak that followed was surprisingly by the book. There was the obligatory sushi-and-mocktail pity party with friends. The tear-stained phone call to my mother where I announced, with complete certainty, that I was going to die alone, followed immediately by her announcing, with absolutely no supporting evidence, that Brandon was probably gay. Then came the emotional support stationery: an unnecessary set of Japanese pens and a beautiful marbled notebook that convinced me this time my healing would be exceptionally well documented.

After only five dates, the grieving period was mercifully brief. Within a few weeks, Brandon had become just another almost-relationship filed away with the others.

Then I opened Instagram and found a message request from “Jessica”.

Brandon’s mother.

I’d known Brandon had gone to his parents’ house for the Fourth of July just days before our fifth date, which must’ve been when he’d brought me up to her. Reading Jessica’s message, with all its judgment and vitriol, unlocked a bizarre alternate timeline in my head. In it, Brandon takes the condom off and I don’t stop him.

Months later I’m staring at two pink lines, explaining to him, far beyond the point where the conversation is comfortable, that while I’m pro-choice, I’m not personally someone who could have an abortion. He begs me not to keep it and as the soft, mushy Pisces that I am, I have the baby anyway.

It’s a boy and I call him Keanu named after Keanu Reeves who was also raised by a single mother.

Years later Keanu begs to meet his father, so we drive to suburban Connecticut for Thanksgiving. Brandon is carving a roast or glazing a ham or doing whatever non-Jewish people do in late November. (Fuck if I know.)

Keanu spots him first. “DADDY!”

He sprints through the front door.

Brandon is horrified. Perhaps not quite as horrified as Jessica, who looks up from the Thanksgiving table and recognizes me instantly. Not because we’ve met.

Because I’m the vulgar influencer her son once mentioned dating over the Fourth of July. The scary liberal internet whore she’d only ever encountered on her Instagram feed or as a sleep paralysis demon in her worst nightmares.

Then comes the second realization.

I’m no longer just a woman she disapproves of. I’m family now permanently tethered to her by way of an unplanned grandchild.

She slowly turns toward Brandon, now in his mid-thirties, and whisper-yells across the room,

“What have you done?”

It is in this sort of manic, somewhat mentally ill daydream that I text Jessica back.

And then I reflected on it for a while, finding myself getting angrier and angrier.

Women talk online about the cost of dating: the shaving and plucking, the makeup, the therapy, the blowouts. But for me, the most exhausting part has always been something harder to quantify: walking into each new date pretending I haven’t already been discarded, ghosted, humiliated, or made to feel disposable by the men who came before him.

It’s not a feeling exclusive to women, but the particular style of discard after sex, the abrupt emotional vacancy, the sense that someone who wanted access to your body suddenly can’t be bothered with your humanity, is one so many women know intimately.

So to hear from a stranger, after dating her man-child son, that I somehow lacked what it took to be a good mother felt like an insult too absurd to leave unanswered.

So, I turned my fury toward the camera and I made this video.

It’s hard to know what’s going to go viral, but regardless of what I expected, the video did. It racked up 3.5 million views. More importantly, it reached “Sara”.

Sara had spotted Brandon and me together on our third date. She had no idea who I was at the time, but she’d dated him the year before and had written about him in the Facebook group Are We Dating the Same Guy? She sent me screenshots. Beneath her post were four other women describing experiences with Brandon that were almost identical to mine.

Each of them said he’d removed the condom without their consent. For two of the women, Brandon admitted afterward that he couldn’t orgasm with a condom on. For the other three, he never acknowledged it at all. Sara was the one who explained to the women in the comments that what they’d experienced had a name. In New York, secretly removing a condom without your partner’s consent, commonly referred to as stealthing, is recognized as a form of sexual assault.

So, by the time Jessica sent me her next message, I was no longer just angry on my own behalf, I was furious on theirs too.

A woman who didn’t believe women just felt so incredibly blasé in the year of our Lord 2026, and I said as much in my next video. My point was simple: if Jessica was worried about legal liability, her son’s documented pattern of stealthing women put him in far greater legal jeopardy than anything I’d posted online.

Maybe it was the virality of the videos, or maybe it was Jessica’s fury, but after my latest post Brandon unblocked me and asked if we could talk.

I wasn’t particularly interested. As an “actions speak louder than words” kind of person, I didn’t feel like I had much to gain from a private conversation unless he was willing to have it on the record but to my surprise, he agreed almost immediately.

His only condition was that the recording remain anonymous.

A couple days later I sent him a Zoom link. There was some logistical preparation I could do for a call like this. But there was nothing that could prepare me for the strange feeling of clinically interviewing someone I’d kissed and shared ice cream with only weeks before.

I hadn’t done my hair or makeup. The impulse flickered for a moment before I shut it down, just as I shut down the impulse to make polite small talk or smile. I just waited for his screen to flicker to life then hit record.

“Why are you agreeing to do this with me?”

Brandon’s eyebrows lifted as if to say, We’re just going straight into it?

I didn’t change my expression.

I’m paywalling the full conversation. Brandon says things that minimize, rationalize, and excuse sexual violence in ways I think people need to see.

But if his words are going to live on the internet, they can at least do something useful. Fifty percent of every subscription to this post this month will be donated to the Crime Victims Treatment Center. NYC’s first rape crisis center, so this conversation that tried to excuse harm can instead help support women.

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Every Man Is Trainable (ok not every man but most)

Let’s be honest with ourselves, most men give oral sex the way they approach assembling IKEA furniture: overconfident, underprepared, and sticking their hands in holes with the reckless abandon of a child with wet fingers in an electrical socket.

The good news is that almost every man can improve. All it takes is a little coaching.

What’s behind the paywall?

• How to confidently ask for oral sex without feeling self-conscious.

• The concept of layering (building arousal before direct clitoral stimulation) and how to ask for it

• Orbiting and hinting: two teasing techniques that create anticipation and make touch feel more intense, and how to coax your partner to start doing it with you.

• Exactly how to ask for different tongue techniques (flat tongue, upward strokes, circles, suction, and more).

• Fingering techniques that pair well with oral, including how to communicate them in real time.

• Why slowing down often leads to stronger orgasms, and how to ask your partner to do it.

• The biggest mistake people make during oral sex, and the simple sentence that fixes it.

• More than 30 ready-to-use phrases you can actually say during oral sex

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Everyone likes being a little bit altered during sex. That’s half the reason I used to drink. When I had a little social lubricant in your system, the deeply unsexy neurotic parts of me felt (at least) a few feet further away. All my insecurities, my trust issues, the running commentary in my head about whether my stomach looks weird from this angle, they temporarily clock out.

The problem with alcohol is that it’s a blunt instrument. It’s like breaking down a wall with a wrecking ball, you’re going to undoubtably fuck up the house. The same chemical helping you get past your inhibitions is also numbing the pleasure on the other side of them.

It’s why, after I got sober, I became fascinated by hypnosis in erotic settings. I still wanted access to that feeling of letting go, but I wanted to get there by going deeper into my body instead of further away from it.

So below is my guide to using hypnotic trance to heighten your sexual experiences:

What you get behind the paywall:

• How to guide someone into trance using simple suggestions

• A roadmap to my favorite hypnosis techniques on youtube

• How to customize hypnotic suggestions to match your partner’s sensory style

• Using trance to heighten body awareness and physical sensation

• Bringing trance into foreplay without making hypnosis feel like a separate activity

• Why “paying attention” may be the most erotic skill hypnosis teaches

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A “unicorn” is a single woman recruited to be the supporting character in your relationship. She arrives with enthusiasm, low expectations, and the emotional footprint of an Airbnb guest, so don’t let her drink your fucking LaCroix.

Welcome to my guide to finding your perfect unicorn with maximum efficiency and minimum self-awareness.

Step 1: Identify your Unicorn’s habitat

The ideal Unicorn Job? No job.

Your first choice is always going to be a woman with generational wealth pursuing a self-designed major at an Ivy League school. Ideally she’s writing a thesis on something like beetle homosexuality or “the erotic subtext of maritime grief.” The important thing is that it sounds intellectually alive while contributing absolutely nothing to society. This ensures she has unlimited free time to focus on what really matters: stabilizing your relationship.

Your second option is a whimsical, barely employed Bushwick bisexual who is legally squatting in her apartment because she chose to spend her rent money on a back tattoo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This is also a strong candidate because she’ll hear the phrase “we just want open communication” and mistake it for housing security.

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Step 2: Seduce with Trust

People always ask me, “Okay, but how do I even approach my unicorn?” Great question.

The key is immediately convincing her that you and your partner are emotionally safe people. This is why it’s important to lead with your therapy experience. Personally, I like to say something casual like, “We’ve done six months of therapy and read about a third of an Esther Perel book in 2018, so… we deserve this.”

Step 3: Set clear expectations and boundaries

Transparency is really important. Your unicorn deserves to know exactly what emotional void she’s being brought in to fill. Be upfront about the gaps in your sex life and that you’re expecting her to fill them in an emotional way, but not in a clingy way.

You really want to establish early on that you and your partner are the priority. That way she won’t get distracted by their own emotional needs, or whether she’s being treated like a sentient fleshlight with baby bangs and bad childhood.

Remember: the perfect unicorn is someone who’s comfortable using this as a mantra: Separate but equal (unless she’s black, then I’d maybe use another turn of phrase.)

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Step 4: Creating a welcoming environment

When your unicorn enters your apartment, your attire is going to set the tone for where they stand in the dynamic. I recommend wearing something like your wedding dress and socks. This sends the message: “welcome to my home,” but also, “if you make eye contact with my husband during sex I will get physically violent.”

Little details matter. Maybe there’s wine or soft lighting or seventeen professionally shot framed photos of you and your partner staring at each other lovingly in a pumpkin patch.

Step 5: Establish relationship harmony

You’re gonna wanna make sure your unicorn likes you and your partner the exact same amount. A good way to confirm this is by asking her point-blank: “What percentages do you like me versus my partner?” (Ideally you’re looking for a clean 50/50 split.)

If the number dips even slightly, you’re gonna want to casually follow up with questions like: “Why don’t you like me?” “What did I do wrong?” “Was it something I said?” “Are you emotionally abandoning me like my father did?”

This line of questioning is really effective for fostering the ideal attachment style for a unicorn dynamic: emotionally self-monitoring, while constantly aware that one poorly timed emotional need could get her softly voted off the island.

Step 5: Make sure you have exactly the same politics

You’re gonna want to make sure your politics align. Not by grilling them, by slowly interviewing them in a dark room under a single hanging bulb.

You want to build trust but in a way that establishes dominance, this might look like asking them how they feel about identity politics, but refusing to define what you mean by identity politics.

Presenting increasingly niche discourse scenarios and watching for signs of panic. Remember, if she can’t explain her position on horizontal organizing structures and the political implications of owning rental property, how can you possibly trust her with your husband?

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Step 6: Have Sex With The Unicorn

Congratulations. You’ve done the emotional labor. You’ve discussed boundaries, attachment styles, and communication frameworks. You’re finally ready to have sex with the unicorn.

Something I personally like doing, mid coitus, during a menage a trois, is looking my unicorn directly in the eye and saying, “you’re here cause the Peloton didn’t fix us.”

Remember: the unicorn is not there to have her own experience. She’s there to serve the same purpose as a juice cleanse or a meditation app: convincing you and your partner that the problem is external.

Happy hunting!

Chef Tova

When KB, my event producer, stormed into the green room of my space-laser-themed burlesque Shabbat, she immediately pressed her mouth to my ear and asked, “Where exactly is the new go-go dancer from?”

From her clipped tone, I could tell whatever was going to come out of her mouth next was going to be pejorative.

Under different circumstances, I would’ve told her the truth. But there were three hundred attendees outside waiting to be entertained, and I didn’t have the energy for a conversation that would inevitably begin and end with judgment.

So I shrugged.

“Instagram.”

Because I just didn’t have the bandwidth to explain to KB that I hired a stripper from AA.

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The first time they shared at a meeting, I was struck by the potency of their story and the near-alarming candor with which they told it. JJ had studied classical music at NYU and had been one of the most promising musicians in their program. They were the type who gets accepted into wildly competitive opportunities and is destined to “make it.” And maybe they would have, if being a musician were a matter of talent alone.

But over the years, they incinerated every opportunity that came their way. Each time something good appeared, their alcoholism found a way to burn it to the ground, striking the match of disrepair over and over again until there was nothing left.

“I became a stripper because I didn’t have any options. But I’ll be honest, I love being a stripper.”

JJ spoke to the AA meeting with an earnestness that caught me off guard.

“I do. It’s a place where I get to meet the lost toys.”

When I got home, I looked up JJ on social media and found a video of them playing the clarinet. The music itself was exacting and beautiful but the contrast between their talent and the grimy dive bar surrounding them was so stark it felt haunting.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I approached them. It was right after a meeting as we drifted toward the customary spread of lukewarm coffee and Trader Joe’s cookies.

At first, JJ was skittish, shy to the point of seeming antisocial. But when I asked where they performed, they slowly began to open up, eventually inviting me to a show they were producing. The show was exactly what I’d expected: half-hidden in the basement of a bar, with a sparse audience made up of visibly queer Bushwick types and a handful of strange, lurking men.

But JJ seemed completely unconcerned with the size of the crowd or the grunge of their surroundings. Their attention was fixed entirely on the performers: fat, queer, trans, artists who did live piercings, taxidermy drag, and aerial routines performed to voicemails of ex-lovers.

JJ mother-henned all of them with such tenderness and devotion that watching them felt like a performance in its own right. With strong but tender hands, they sprayed wigs, threaded safety pins through costumes, adjusted loose straps, and double-swept and mopped the sticky floors so nobody would trip. JJ’s shows weren’t just where they booked acts, it was where they built a refuge.

There was no performer who seemed better suited for my Burlesque Shabbat, a gathering where edgy Jews congregate precisely because they’re considered too sinful or strange for the more polite corners of Jewish life.

But I was wrong.

Within minutes of arriving in the green room, JJ had somehow managed to alienate half the cast.

Not only had they irritated KB, who described them as “abrasive and annoying,” but they’d apparently gotten into an argument with one of my lyra performers.

By the end of the night, KB had made it clear that she did not expect JJ would be invited back and to be honest, I wasn’t planning on booking JJ again either.

Then, as all parties do, it came to an end.

The audience filtered out and the performers packed up. The stage kitten left, followed by KB. Even my closest friends drifted away, pulled toward other parties or the promise of sleep.

Yet JJ stayed.

“I know what it’s like to clean up a green room alone,” they said simply.

And because they understood, because I was exhausted, because there are few lonelier feelings than being left behind to clean up after everyone else has gone home, when JJ grabbed a trash bag and started picking up empty bottles and crumpled chip bags, I let them.

It was only after an hour of cleaning, talking, making increasingly questionable mocktails out of warm fruit punch, and eventually lying flat on the floor, that I finally asked JJ what had happened with the performer they’d gotten into a fight with earlier that night.

They turned toward me and laughed.

“She was saying that when men tell women they prefer a shaved pussy, it’s an act of violence against feminism.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“And what did you say?”

JJ shrugged.

“I said this is why fascists won the election.”

I stared at them.

JJ let out a long sigh.

“Let men have pubic hair preferences and reserve the term violence against feminism for when it, I don’t know...matters.”

I looked at the nonbinary person in front of me—the thick eyeliner, the half-shaved head, the blue hair—and the shock must have registered on my face because they laughed.

“Look,” they said, nudging me. “I might be a woke they/them, but I’m not going along with every hill the tender-queers want to die on.”

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This habit of refusing to fall neatly in line was precisely why many of my performers disliked JJ. For many leftist people, to be “in community” is to be in a unified front, and JJ challenged that. They weren’t afraid to disagree with the social groups they were fundamentally a part of.

Rather, they approached ideas with genuine curiosity. Thinking carefully about each topic they touched, often changing their mind to make space for contradiction and nuance. It made JJ unwelcome in many of the leftist spaces they inhabited, but I liked it. So, I kept bringing them back.

The only time I ever told JJ they couldn’t perform was when I knew they were relapsing.

There were stretches where sobriety seemed to slip through their fingers. I’d text them and tell them to reach out when they were back in meetings. Then I’d hear about them through the grapevine, through performers who’d witnessed some drunken outburst or humiliating scene. The gossip always arrived with the same exasperated amusement.

Can you believe it?

Could I believe it? Of course I could.

Because for years I’d been the girl with the hundred-thousand-dollar culinary education who got fired from nearly every job she ever took. I was the girl who showed up to work drunk, who ruined her sister’s birthday, who spent months begging for forgiveness, only to relapse all over again.

I don’t excuse the things JJ did while in the depths of their addiction.

But when JJ got canceled by the entire New York burlesque community, when friends turned on them, when strangers on the internet picked apart their failures for sport, when club after club quietly decided there would never again be a place for them on the bill, I felt something inside me rupture. I wasn’t just furious. I was willing to burn down every bridge standing in the way of telling this story.

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JJ had a client they knew from stripping, a regular at clubs where they worked, a guy who went by the moniker “Mr. Chu,” who bought lap dances from them. When JJ brought Mr. Chu to a show and he touched a performer without consent, JJ handled it in what, at the time, seemed like the logic of nightlife damage control: telling him directly that it wasn’t okay and temporarily prohibiting him from the club. The rationale was that as a patron of strippers, he genuinely did not understand the difference in etiquette between a strip club and a burlesque show.

But a few months later, JJ brought Mr. Chu to a show they were not producing, and another transgression of a performer’s physical boundaries happened.

This time, several months after the incident, the performer he touched without consent made a public post describing how violated she felt, and the local burlesque scene shared it to everyone, each repost carrying the same warning: Don’t let this guy in, protect your performers. Several other performers shared similar experiences of boundary-crossing or creepy advances from Mr. Chu while JJ was not present. Personal accounts ranged in severity, and I do not doubt any claims of this man’s shitty, abusive behavior.

When I first witnessed the online outcry, I admired how this small community rallied to protect performers from predatory men. It’s an issue I take seriously in my own work as a producer.

But there was almost no meaningful way for the community to punish Mr. Chu himself. He was basically just some random creepy client with a burner-ish social media presence and no real ties to the scene. The person who could be held publicly accountable was JJ.

The story online rapidly stopped being “a man behaved inappropriately at a show” and became “JJ brought a predator into a safe space.” And as these things tend to do online, the accusations escalated with each retelling.

Because JJ had met this man through sex work, and because JJ existed in this blurry overlap between stripping and burlesque, the narrative mutated into JJ grooming performers into sex work and facilitating abuse.

The language in the tiny burlesque scene soon became carceral. It was demanded JJ not only be banned from producing, but banned from performing and effectively exiled from the scene entirely.

So, JJ tried to engage with their consequences. They reached out to a self-appointed mediator in the space and did their best to repent, but each step they took to move toward absolution was rejected. Their apology wasn’t long enough, so they made it longer, more specific, more self-critical.

They attempted to apologize to each individual person they harmed as the mediator told them to do, but most people blocked them on social media, making direct communication literally impossible.

So the process became circular. The stated demand was accountability, but no form of accountability was actually capable of resolving the situation. There was no off-ramp where JJ could meaningfully re-enter community life because, by that point, the real social objective seemed less about repair and more about disappearance, an opportunity to finally push a deeply messy person out of the scene for good.

So JJ lost everything. They lost friends, collaborators, venues, shows. People either blocked them outright or sent the more cowardly message of: I don’t think you’re unsafe, but I don’t want to lose my community too.

And that was the real punishment. Not just losing gigs, but losing the small world they had spent years building. In the three years before their cancelation, through active alcoholism and obvious personal collapse, JJ still religiously produced little dive-bar burlesque shows every month making sure there was a stage for people who didn’t have one anywhere else and then those same people turned on them.

That is the part I still find so devastating. Because these were people who chanted the language of supporting sex workers, believing in restorative justice, protecting addicts, making space for neurodivergent people, holding complexity. But the second it became sticky and those politics required actual discomfort, risk, or social consequence, it became clear how little of it was deeply held. How much of it was vocabulary and costuming: a set of words people used to recognize one another in the dark.

I talked to JJ throughout this, watching them lose show after show in real time. A venue would announce them, and then the internet mob would descend. The same leftists who talked endlessly about the violence of policing queer people suddenly became cops with better eyeliner, a group I called Glitter Cops.

The Glitter Cops started going show to show, venue to venue, messaging every producer JJ was attached to to take JJ off their lineup. And most people complied immediately because, honestly, if you’re some exhausted Brooklyn show producer barely making rent off ticket sales, you don’t want to touch a social media firestorm with a ten-foot pole. They didn’t care about the drama, they just saw a tidal wave of moral panic and decided it was safer to cut JJ loose than risk becoming collateral damage.

Every show dropped JJ except mine, I kept JJ on the lineup for the Red Scare Shabbat

Part of why I felt so strongly about it was because of the theme itself. The Red Scare, historically, was a period where the American government and public institutions branded artists and performers as socially dangerous people whose ideas and presence needed to be eradicated from public life. Careers were destroyed less through formal punishment than through collective fear and social contagion.

So it felt grotesquely hypocritical to make a show about political hysteria and blacklisting while simultaneously participating in the exact same impulse. Here was a performer already in the throes of public expulsion, I couldn’t get myself to cut JJ too just because it was socially safer.

Until the call…

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Less than a week before the show, one of the performers reached out asking to have a call. I get on Zoom and suddenly there are four or five other performers there telling me they’ve been contacted by the Glitter Cops, that people are saying JJ is unsafe, and that they don’t really know the full story but they’re uncomfortable performing if JJ is in the lineup.

Then people began sharing their own stories. Not stories about assault or predation, but stories about JJ being drunk at shows. Stories about the particular selfishness and volatility that addiction leaves in its wake.

Soon, JJ’s alcoholism collapsed into one larger narrative.

The language on the zoom began to shift to words like predator and groomer.

I had to close my laptop because I wanted to scream.

I wanted to scream that every time they treated this person as disposable, every time they tried to make them disappear, they were talking about me too.

Because I am not the rule.

I am the exception.

I am the addict who got a second act. The addict who found an audience willing to call her dysfunction authenticity and her volatility honesty. I took traits that would have made me unemployable and repackaged them as content.

The internet found me charming but that’s just framing, baby.

The truth is that I didn’t survive addiction because I was better than JJ.

I survived because enough people looked at me in my worst moments and saw a person instead of a verdict.

That being said, as a producer, I was suddenly faced with a much more practical question: do I hold to my principles, or do I risk losing half my cast three days before the event?

In the end, I took JJ off the show.

A show they’d spent weeks preparing for, painstakingly building a custom routine and handmaking a costume that would never make it onstage.

I went up to Harlem to break the news in person, and, if I’m honest, part of me hoped they’d make a scene. I hoped they’d argue, bargain, call me a hypocrite and coward because any of that would’ve felt easier than what actually happened.

JJ just nodded.

“Yeah,” they said. “I know. I get it…I’m sorry I caused you so much trouble.”

What gutted me wasn’t that they apologized for the drama, it was that they apologized for the inconvenience of their own collapse.

So, I made JJ a promise that day, I told them: I’m going to bring you back.

I knew the act I wanted JJ to perform and I told them as much over coffee the following week.

“I want you to play the clarinet, I mean you can do an act after but I want people to hear you play.”

JJ’s eyebrows thread together before they said, “I mean… I think I could do it on the pole. Like I could probably play clarinet while spinning on the pole.”

Weeks leading up to the show, they kept bracing for the other shoe to drop. Almost every day they’d text me some version of: Hey, if you need to take me off the lineup, just let me know in advance. I understand.

They were terrified to even be publicly announced, terrified of the Glitter Cops, terrified of being torn down yet again. I’d never seen someone tremble so hard backstage, before performing what I can only describe as a religious experience.

It was the first time in almost six months that JJ had been allowed to perform for a room bigger than twenty people and by complete coincidence, or maybe fate, it also happened to fall on their hundredth day sober.

Which is almost unimaginable when your entire life exists inside bars, when your income comes from stripping, when every shift ends with shots, when every green room smells like tequila and cigarettes and stale beer. They got sober in the exact environment most designed to keep them drunk.

JJ walked onstage looking completely unlike the other performers. Everyone else looked theatrical and polished but JJ looked raw, like the person you see at a strip club, micro-bikini, platform heels, bruised knees. Not the fantasy of a sex worker, a real one. The stripper who takes warm money from old men and hand-washes sequins at four in the morning.

I held my breath as JJ got on the pole and began to play.

The punk-klezmer piece sounded almost like grief itself. The room was suddenly overtaken with the kind of silence that happens when people realize they are witnessing something they will never see again.

Because nobody else could do that act.

Nobody else is a conservatory-trained musician who became a stripper. The addict who claws their way to a hundred days sober while being publicly exiled from the only community they’d ever known. The person who had lost almost everything and still climbed onto a stage to make a beautiful thing no one else could.

It didn’t feel like a performance. It felt like a body standing under stage lights repeating the same impossible sentence over and over again:

I exist.

For six months JJ had been treated like contagion and for four minutes they transcended all of it.

The act ended and the room detonated into applause. But the moment JJ stepped backstage, they folded, sobbing with exhaustion and relief, the type of tears ripped from somewhere ancient and humiliated.

Later, after they had calmed down, I told them I wanted to take a photo together and when they quietly declined I insisted, “I don’t care what people think of me, I want to be seen with you.”

Not out of defiance. Not out of some need to flip a finger to the burlesque community.

But because I was proud.

Proud that beneath all the chaos and addiction and self-destruction there remained an astonishing performer capable of making an entire room fall silent. Proud that in a world engineered to keep us numb, they had woken up a hundred days and chose to be sober anyway.

But more than anything, I was proud that they had refused to disappear.

Jayjayy if you are reading this, I am proud you exist.

I am proud to be your friend.

Always.

Not in secret, but in the limelight, where everyone can see it.

Jayjayy is an NYC-based performer who specializes in burlesque, pole, aerial, clarinet, and saxophone. You can find them on social media behaving like a menace.

_{Special thank you to the many sex workers, performers, and producers who consulted on this piece to help ensure accuracy and authenticity.}

I wear a sheer black dress as the strip club fills up around me. It’s the same club from Anora, now swelling to capacity. There’s always a peculiar electricity in the minutes before a performance begins, before the burlesque dancers peel off their gloves one finger at a time, before the sword swallower emerges, before the professional clowns wander table to table offering absurdity as salvation from otherwise ordinary nights.

The room is crowded with strangers, but none of them feel accidental. They have arrived through the strange breadcrumb trail of my online reputation: the unhinged girl who throws parties with strippers, who calls her mother while high, who plays pranks on men in bars, who asks friends if she can cuck their sexual experiences, turning the spectacle into essays. They know the version of me I’ve constructed long before they know the person standing in front of them. That is why they came.

I’ve found a certain confidence in hosting parties as an internet celebrity. In the beginning, I gave my followers too much agency within our interactions, letting social awkwardness roam free while they struggled to bridge the uncanny gap between the girl they felt they knew intimately online and the stranger standing in front of them.

But the more accustomed I became to attention, the more playful I learned to be with it. I crafted a party persona who used the false sense of familiarity to take social risks. I’d compliment breasts, I’d ask to touch people’s eyebrows, I’d pull strangers onto the dance floor, kiss foreheads, and whisper secrets into ears I’ll never remember. The party version of me is not only a pleasure to inhabit, she leaves very little room for fawning. The message is clear: if you want to approach me like we already know each other, fine. Let’s get to know each other.

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It is a kind of sea best navigated with anchors, people who know me well enough to witness me inside the character of myself. People I can drift back toward throughout the night to gossip over Diet Cokes at the bar, to squeeze hands and hide in bathrooms with.

Tonight, that person is Astor, a person I originally stalked on Substack before they somehow became my friend and editor.

They wear a long skirt and a low-cut dress with thin spaghetti straps, exposing the tattoos scattered along their arms like annotations in a margin. Their dirty blonde hair frames their face in soft, controlled waves, and standing beside them gives me a strange sense of power, as though beauty itself can be communal.

We orbit each other all night, drifting apart and naturally returning. As the mainstage act approaches, we finally settle into our seats. The room tightens toward the stage; conversation dissolves into anticipation. It feels like the collective inhale before a plunge, an exhale from the labor of being social.

That’s when a familiar face approaches me: Emma. I’ve seen her drifting through various Jewish events over the years, as she’s a dating coach who once offered to set me up with someone—the kind of warm acquaintance built through repeated collisions.

I try to place where I saw her last, turning my memory into a game I narrate aloud. We’d both gone to a sauna once, but no, that wasn’t it. Then I remember: a Shabbat dinner on the Upper West Side.

“Not usually my scene,” I tell her, “but a guy I was seeing invited me.”

I clarify that we’re not dating anymore, and Emma smiles at me with a softness that immediately feels dangerous.

“I know,” she says. “We actually just went on a date.”

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“A Jewish doctor?! That’s who ya dating?”

I chuckled softly to myself as I witnessed my mom, ostensibly losing her shit over the phone.

I sighed into the receiver. I intentionally left out the fact that he was a pediatrician. The excitement it would’ve unleashed in my suburban Jewish mother had the capacity to be medically harmful.

“Can I get a picture?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, “yea ok, I’ll send you a picture later.”

My mom moved into gushing, “After the artsy fruitcake who left you for the other team, I’m glad we moved the target.”

“Mom! He wasn’t an artist, he was a corporate creative director and just because he was bisexual doesn’t mean he left me for a man.”

The second the words left my mouth I realized I had neither the capacity nor the patience right then to defend the existence of male bisexuality, so I ejected from the call as quickly as possible.

“Mom, I gotta go, Josh made dinner.”

Another silence.

“A doctor who cooks?” she whispered.

I hung up before she could ask for his sperm count.

When I clicked the receiver off, Josh looked up at me from the stove. “Just me?” he asked, “or are all Jewish mothers exactly the same?”

I slid onto the stool at his kitchen island. “Carbon copies.”

That morning, when he’d asked what I wanted for dinner, I’d said spaghetti carbonara, and like the attentive future husband of my mother’s dreams, he’d obliged… kind of.

The pasta he’d made was some kind of fava bean fusilli with a cauliflower-based sauce.

“Tastes just like the real thing,” he said proudly over the unscented candle he’d lit between us.

“Totally,” I nodded.

It tasted like hot beans and blended vegetables but that’s not the kind of thing you say to a perfect-on-paper man three months into dating.

Before Josh, I’d dated a rotating cast of artsy, emotionally unavailable men who took me on motorcycle rides, brought me to sex parties, and stayed up with me until 3 a.m. talking about Russian literature before gently informing me that labels felt claustrophobic.

Due to the aforementioned emotional devastation, I find myself sitting across from a man who asked me about my plans to have kids on the first date and made bean pasta.

When we finished up the fusilli, Josh loaded the dishwasher, refusing my insistence on helping, and he asked if I wanted to watch TV.

In my limited experience dating an “adult,” I’d learned this was their version of foreplay, sitting upright to digest for forty-five minutes to an hour before having sex.

I was usually the kind of girl who was already playing footsie three-fourths of the way through dinner, but I’d become accustomed to Josh’s cadence, the way he’d only start kissing my neck after a full episode of Love Is Blind.

Like everything about Josh, the sex had a predictability to it.

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About a month into dating, when we started sleeping together, he asked if I could shower beforehand.

I’d tried to make it sexy, suggesting we do it together, sudsing each other’s bodies while kissing under the stream of water but Josh politely declined.

“It’s more of a utility thing,” he explained.

The second time we had sex I told him I’d be fine touching myself rather than him going down on me and I watched a look of relief cross his face. “Ok great! If I’m honest, I don’t really enjoy doing it, so that’s perfect.”

I could tell.

But I didn’t say that out loud; I wanted our more efficient version of sex to feel like a mutual evolution rather than a compromise.

And I think, if I’m being honest, my desire to become a naked figure drawing model for an art class came from wanting some kind of reaction out of Josh. I wanted to watch a flicker of possessive passion cross his face. But when I announced the idea he just calmly endorsed my bodily autonomy and told me to “have fun,” like the kind of emotionally regulated success story psychologists write papers about.

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I felt extra naked showing up to intermediate figure drawing because I’d shaved myself into pre-pubescence, a preference Josh had revealed early on in our relationship.

The art teacher, a silver-haired woman in her sixties, ushered me into a small changing room directly behind the stage where I’d be posing nude.

The privacy of it all felt comedically performative considering a room of strangers were about to spend the next hour staring at my body while attempting to recreate the exact curvature of my breasts in graphite, but I accepted politely.

When the graduate class filed in, I felt like Medusa, an errantly naked woman in the corner of the room the students seemed terrified of looking at incorrectly. I watched as their eyes ricocheted like loose change and felt a strange sense of power in it.

There was only one woman in the class who actually looked me in the eye, a women named Violet.

Violet had long dark brown hair dyed purple halfway down, sharply ironed black pants, and a collared shirt buttoned all the way up. Not much of her skin showed, but tattoos slipped from under her sleeves and collar in careful tendrils like vines across an abandoned building.

Throughout the class I shifted into various poses. I was exhilarated by the freneticism of everyone’s eyes, the way they moved from my body to the page and back again. There was a poetry to it: a room full of people chasing to capture a motionless woman.

I watched them as they watched me, but the steely green eyes I kept returning to were Violet’s.

She seemed to be the only one unintimidated by the impossible task of turning flesh and bones into a series of lines. While the others glanced at me in hurried fragments, Violet lingered, her eyes moving slowly across sections of my body, studying them for long stretches before committing to a single stroke. I couldn’t see her drawing, but I was certain she was the best in the class.

When I put my clothes back on and walked around the room, I realized that the differentiating factor of Violet’s sketches was movement beneath them. In her renderings, the positions I took didn’t look like frozen poses. Her drawings felt like she’d caught me mid-thought: a capture of not my shape, but my humanness beneath it.

Violet said nothing as I stared at her work, and I felt shy in her presence. I left quickly and it was only after I’d exited the building, that I felt fingers tap lightly against my shoulder.

“Hey.”

I turned to find Violet standing there, one hand tucked into the pocket of her black pants. “You have a really fascinating body. I’d love to draw it more sometime.”

Violet’s words had such an unguarded sincerity that the inherent flirtation simply felt like an observation. Instead of shrinking behind the compliment, I found myself asking, “What do you like about it?”

“Your body has an edge of athleticism,” she said slowly, “while still maintaining an androgynous softness.”

She smiled faintly. “And your lines.”

“My lines?”

She nodded.

“Your body makes the most beautiful lines.”

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Later that night, lying in bed beside Josh, I traced my fingers along his cheek and asked softly, “What do you like about my body?”

Josh shifted onto his side to look at me. “I like that you look healthy.”

The word landed with a dull thud between us.

My face must have changed, because I could practically see his mind scrambling for something better to offer. “I mean, you’re objectively attractive,” he added quickly.

I kissed him before he could continue assembling compliments that were articulated like a performance review. But when I pulled away, he was studying me now, his eyebrows drawn together slightly.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

Over dinner he’d asked about the figure drawing class, and I’d told him everything. The room, the poses, the students avoiding my eyes. Everything except Violet. Now, lying beside him naked, I realized I would never be able to.

I let the silence stay open between us, soft and waiting, giving him the space to ask me to be his girlfriend.

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I walked into Violet’s studio expecting an artist’s loft, and was surprised to find an empty tattoo parlor. The blinds were drawn, giving the room an after-hours secrecy despite the fact that it was barely three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Three tattoo chairs sat abandoned in the half-dark like sleeping machinery.

Without speaking much, Violet draped muslin fabric across the floor.

As I undressed in front of her slowly, Violet didn’t offer the polite apology people usually give when confronted with another person’s nakedness. She watched me with the same steady attention she had in class, and, instead of making me self-conscious, it made something warm unfurl low inside me.

Something deeper than comfort.

I could feel my body responding to her gaze, my skin flushing, my nipples hardening in the cool air of the studio. Normally I would have been embarrassed by the evidence of wanting but I wasn’t.

Violet began to draw me, periodically rising from her stool to adjust my body with complete concentration, moving my wrist or turning my waist by the smallest degree.

“Beautiful.” “Perfect,” she murmured softly.

As she lifted my head, my eyes caught on an analog clock hanging crookedly near the ceiling, its hands frozen at five o’clock.

“Your clock doesn’t work,” I said.

I looked at her and saw the edge of a smile appear on her lips.

“It works.”

She could clearly feel the question thicken inside me. But instead of explaining herself, Violet stepped closer, one hand still lightly resting against my shoulder, and said quietly:

“You should stay for my next client coming in. I think you’ll like it.”

I didn’t hide the skepticism on my face and she laughed, “just stay.” So I did.

A couple minutes after I got dressed, the front door opened and a tall woman walked into the studio. She had severe cheekbones, a buzz cut, and a sleeve of tattoos trailing down one arm. At first she carried herself with a kind of cool detachment, but the second she saw Violet, her entire face broke into a cherubic smile.

After embracing the woman whose name I learned was Lily, Violet gestured to me, “this is Tova.”

Lily raised an eyebrow at me. “Friend? Lover?”

I expected Violet to rush to clarify that we were just platonic, but she didn’t. Instead, her fingertips drifted lightly across my waist as she said: “She’s my muse.”

The admission caught me off guard, but Violet continued without hesitation. “She’s also going to observe your session, if you don’t mind.”

Lily nodded, her gaze sliding toward me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “Violet explained how this works, right?”

I glanced over at Violet, who was dragging a stepstool beneath the frozen clock to switch it on.

“I will in just a moment,” she said.

She carried the stool across the room to a second clock I hadn’t noticed before, identical to the first and equally still. The moment she brought them both to life, the room filled with their synchronized ticking, steady as a metronome. Then she switched on a sound machine, releasing the soft hiss of rain into the space.

To my surprise, another sound joined it.

“Is that a windshield wiper?”

Violet wheeled out what looked exactly like a windshield wiper mounted on a box, but when she flicked it on, the sound was uncanny, smooth and frictionless, stripped of glass and rain, leaving behind only the rhythmic sweep itself.

Only once everything seemed perfectly arranged did Lily finally sit down.

Violet turned to me. “I hypnotize people while tattooing so my clients don’t focus on the pain.” She gestured toward the clocks and the windshield wiper. “Bilateral stimulation.”

I pointed to the sound machine. “And the rain?”

Violet shrugged, laughing. “That’s just to make the windshield wiper less weird.”

A giggle bubbled out of me at the idea that a sound machine could possibly do the heavy lifting required to make any of this feel less weird. But as my laughter faded, Violet’s expression sharpened back into seriousness. She got to work positioning Lily’s hand on the stand before switching on the tattoo gun.

The clocks ticked steadily between us. Behind Lily, I sat watching the windshield wiper sweep back and forth through the dim room, lulling in its strange, soundless rhythm.

Violet’s voice was grounding and soothing as she began issuing instructions in quick succession: notice your breath, notice the clock, remember the smell of freshly cut watermelon, now burnt toast, feel your toes, concentrate on your left ear, then your right.

She guided me back to my breathing again and again until my body began to sink into itself. I could feel myself growing heavy, heavier than I’d ever felt before. After that, my memory dissolved. I didn’t remember what happened next, only that I slipped into what Violet would later describe as a state of trance.

The next thing I knew, Violet was touching my arm.

“Welcome back,” she said gently.

I inhaled sharply as my eyes fell to Lily’s hand. The skin that had been bare only moments ago was now covered in a lattice of dark branches crawling over the bones of her hand and curling up her fingers, blossoms opening delicately between them.

Lily turned her wrist beneath the light, inspecting it before looking back at me with unmistakable delight.

“Wild, isn’t it?”

All I could do was sit there mute, nodding faintly. When I reached for my phone to check the time, I saw a missed call from Josh and a text.

He’d sent a picture of a carton of ice cream. The label was brightly colored; the whole pint had only 320 calories and sixteen grams of protein.

At the store, he’d texted. Should I pick us up a treat?

Something in my stomach curdled. The same feeling that settled in me when we switched exclusively to using lube because he never wanted to spend time on the foreplay. The same feeling I got eating utilitarian dinners with stand-in replacements for the carbs and creams and butters I wanted.

Lily paid for the design in cash, and, as she was leaving, Violet asked if I’d stay a moment longer so she could ask me something.

I waited in the strange hush that settled after the door closed behind Lily. Violet crossed the room to the stack of sketches she’d done of me, flipping through them until she pulled out one in particular: a drawing of my nude body stretched upward, one arm reaching toward the sky.

She studied it for a moment, visibly transfixed by her own work. Then she pointed to the curve where my torso bent softly over my hips.

“The subtlety of it is exquisite,” she said quietly.

When she looked back at me, there was something in her expression that felt almost like permission before she finally said the words.

“I was wondering if I could use this for one of my designs.”

She gestured toward the tattoo drawings covering the wall, and the weight of what she was asking hit me with startling force.

Suddenly, I understood why, when Josh asked me to be his girlfriend, I told him I needed time to think about it.

It was because I didn’t want someone to love my body for its biometric signs of health, for its imagined ability to reproduce. I wanted to be adored so completely that someone would consider my body worthy of being inked permanently into another person’s skin. I wanted someone who delighted in my pleasure, who fed me spoonfuls of full-fat ice cream without trying to optimize it into something leaner or safer or smaller. I wanted someone whose brain lit up at the sound of me moaning in bed, who went down on me simply because they loved to.

“Yes,” I said.

And internally it felt like I was saying yes to something much larger. Yes to letting go of the man who looked perfect on paper, even as the ticking of my biological clock followed me everywhere like a metronome.

Because in the past few hours, time itself had changed shape; the clock of my life no longer felt like an hourglass draining. It felt amorphous, intangible as water, something vast enough to surrender to that I would drown in willingly.

After I agreed to become part of the design, Violet crossed to the small makeshift counter and pulled a few bills from the cash Lily had handed her.

“You don’t think muses leave unpaid?” she said.

She tried to press the money into my hand, but I pushed it gently back toward her. “I can’t accept this.”

She insisted anyway, and, after a few rounds of passing the cash back and forth between us, I finally found a solution.

“I don’t want your money,” I told her. “But if you’d be open to it, I’d love for you to hypnotize me again. I’d be happier taking that than any amount of cash.”

Violet chuckled softly. “You can’t offer me payment in a form I’d take so much pleasure in giving.”

Then her expression shifted, something slower and heavier settling into it.

“Besides,” she said, “if I hypnotized you again, I’d want it to be under very different circumstances.”

I took a step closer before I could stop myself. “What kind of circumstances?”

Violet lifted an eyebrow. “I’d put you into a state of trance again, but deeper this time. I’d get you so fully inside your body you’d feel everything.”

Her voice lowered.

“You’d feel every hair rise on the back of your neck. Every breath leaving your mouth. Your own heartbeat.” She paused, watching me carefully. “So that when I kissed your neck, you’d feel it everywhere, every inch of yourself so vividly that even the lightest touch would be everywhere inside you at once.”

The room suddenly felt smaller, the clocks louder.

Violet hesitated, a flicker of uncertainty crossing her face. “Sorry. I’m being forward. I don’t even know if you’re single.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m single.”

She nodded back once, decisive now. “Then before I induce you into an erotic trance, I should probably take you out first.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Ice cream,” I said. “If you’re down for it, I’d really love to go out for full-fat ice cream.”

So we went out, and over time Violet taught me erotic hypnosis, which brought me into my body more completely than I’d thought possible. Every promise she made was delivered on and then some.

It changed my understanding of desire entirely, of what it means to inhabit your own body. Erotic hypnosis didn’t just alter my sexual baseline; it reshaped the way I understood pleasure itself.

It’s a modality that deserves its own story, and it’s the subject of my next piece. So if you’re curious about erotic hypnosis, or curious enough to want to try it yourself, I highly recommend subscribing.

Till next time,

Chef Tova.

As someone with 800,000 followers across social media, my DMs are essentially the final stage of societal collapse. There are couples soliciting me for threesomes, men asking if they can buy my discharge, death threats from neo-Nazis, and girls I haven’t spoken to since high school saying things like, “Wait stopppp, we should get drinks.”

It’s an overwhelming collage of information that I rifle through when I am bored or going through a manic episode or breakup. But oftentimes there are just enough gems buried in the psychological landfill that every couple of weeks I’ll scroll back through it again.

Last week, roughly 70% of my DMs were communicating one very specific message:

“Tova, are you aware AI stole your body?”

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The world makes room for catastrophic grief. We all know how to gather around a death, a diagnosis, a breakup.

But almost no one talks about cumulative grief. The family member who is still alive but disappearing in front of you piece by piece. The relationship that starves from neglect. The job that never fires you, only reminds you in a hundred humiliating ways that you are replaceable.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from repeatedly attempting CPR on things that no longer have a pulse.

And because these losses don’t arrive all at once, they rarely feel socially “valid” enough to mourn openly. There’s no funeral the first time a parent forgets your name. There’s no casserole the day you find apathy in the person who once memorized the way you take your coffee. There’s no bereavement leave the first time a lover ignores your touch to reach for the remote. No language for what it costs to keep putting your hands back into something that keeps cutting you.

That’s the cruel thing about cumulative grief: its invisibility makes it easier to disappear into. You start believing that because no one else can see the wound, it must not be deep enough to matter.

And If you’ve read this far, I know no one can see it, that quiet thing you keep kneeling beside long after everyone else has left the room. The thing you keep pressing your hands against, hoping warmth might return to it if you just love it harder.

But nothing heals simply because you agreed to hurt for it longer.

So if you’ve been clinging to something that’s been asking you to bleed for it in installments. If you’ve been waiting for a sign that your exhaustion is legitimate, that your sadness is earned, that your pain is finally “enough” to justify letting go, let this be it.

You’ve been setting yourself on fire just to keep something dying warm and you don’t have to.

Ever.

I mean it.

I love you.

Chef Tova

I saw Clavicular at an influencer event recently, the type on a rooftop sponsored by a probiotic soda brand. Ring lights glowed like votive candles and a DJ bravely attempted a remix of “Espresso” while women in trendy outfits filmed themselves not dancing.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I audibly gasped when I saw Clavicular

Silly, because I’m also a person who posts online for a living. I know influencers are real. I know they have mothers and fingerprints and standing dentist appointments. But seeing Clavicular in person gave me the same unsettling feeling I got from seeing my teacher at the grocery store.

Some people just don’t feel designed for physical reality. They belong to the internet, algorithmically delivered to you while you’re lying in bed or eating shredded cheese over the sink at midnight.

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If you don’t already know, Clavicular is colloquially called a “looksmaxxing influencer.” He has the kind of face where you instinctively assume he vapes indoors, but nothing about his appearance is accidental. In fact, he’s dedicated his life to improving his appearance in what he calls “ascending.”

I think seeing Clavicular in person was so jarring because, for the first time, I got to see what his content looked like from the other side.

Online, Clavicular appears statuesque, monotone, and glacial. But in person, the illusion frays almost immediately.

You notice the anxious darting of his eyes, then the makeup: thick, chalky concealer layered over skin that looks irritated, acne ridden and painful underneath it. His content team trails him carrying bright portable lights, but he doesn’t speak to them like a boss or even a collaborator. He speaks to them like an insecure thirteen-year-old midway through a panic attack: rapid little bursts about how the angle is wrong, how his skin looks bad, how he’s not even talking to the right people. And then…

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Megan Fox goes on Call Her Daddy and casually mentions that she drank Machine Gun Kelly’s blood as a new age wedding ritual.

Alex Cooper (the host) giggles with giddiness, Megan’s occult practices are (if nothing else) prime fodder for entertainment. But Megan isn’t fazed. She goes on to articulate the most perfect response:

“You know what I think is weird? Letting a man sperm in your mouth when he hasn’t even bought you a nice drink. That’s what disgusts me.”

She emphasizes the amount of blood was a drop. Meanwhile, the average cumshot is, what, two tablespoons? That’s a vinaigrette. That’s a small salad dressing that might come with HPV.

What you get beyond the paywall:

• How media like Twilight trained us to perceive oral sex

• A paradigm shift to forever change how you see blow jobs

• My actual thoughts on Megan Fox drinking MGK’s blood

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I’m at The Feels, a wildly successful dating event marketed as a “conscious alternative” to dating apps. It starts in a rustic Bushwick loft where I’m greeted by a light assortment of aggressively recognizable Trader Joe’s snacks.

I am confused. For a $117 dollar dating event I thought there would be dinner.

As an event run by a pseudo spiritual white woman, The Feels starts exactly the way you would expect it to, with vaguely non-denominational meditation music. Self-styled dating “guru,” Allie Hoffman steps to the front of the room and asks if we’re okay with her getting a little vulnerable.

This is, of course, a rhetorical question.

She launches into a monologue about the heaviness in her life, describing a kind of emotional cloud that has settled over her “lived experience.” I keep waiting for it to circle back to dating but it doesn’t.

Instead, she’s informing us that, as the facilitator of this event, today is actually a bad day for her.

I scan the room, looking for even one other person who finds this strange, but I am completely alone. The softly unwell Bushwick crowd, draped in artfully distressed, questionably ventilated pants, nod emphatically, as if we are either in group therapy or Black church.

When Allie finally pivots to why we’re all here, she begins by describing us as “ooey gooey singles” who have bravely put our hearts into the world, despite our trauma, in pursuit of love.

Then she asks us to lie down on the floor in a circle. Our heads face the center, our legs outstretched as if they are the “rays of a sun.”

“Wow,” she says, drawing it out like a yoga instructor “Just feel that bravery inside of you.”

I close my eyes. I check in with my body.

What I feel is hungry.

This is a $117 event. I was expecting dinner.

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I’ll be honest, before I even found out about The Feels, I knew of Allison Hoffman. In the small, well-documented ecosystem of nouveau-riche-bohemian-wealth, her reputation traveled by “word of mouth” She was everywhere, always just slightly out of reach but impossible to avoid.

She appeared as the girl in the fifth slide of an Instagram photo dump from Burning Man with multicolored cornrows. She hosted candlelit “conscious dinners” in the homes of multi-millionaire tech founders, where guests sat cross-legged on rented floor cushions while she delivered long, breathy speeches about using tantra to deepen her connection with the ethically non-monogamous partner she met at a sexual shamanism retreat.

Allie seemed to spend hundreds of dollars on intricately curated outfits, complete with custom-designed nails, just to attend a five-hour meditation class, followed by a “sober rave” where everyone was, with impressive discretion, doing ketamine in the bathroom.

My interest in Allie reached an all-time high when she posted a sprawling, completely unedited essay about a $15,000 cruise to Antarctica with her Burner friends.

The piece positioned her not only as the protagonist, but somehow also the victim, trapped in the quiet agony of being slightly less wealthy than the friends she resented. Her central conflict was her deep self-consciousness about “not being like other new age wealthy people,” which, according to her, was preventing her from becoming “fully embodied.” This was particularly devastating given that embodiment was, at the time, her primary goal, one she was actively working on with her trauma-informed, out-of-network therapist, Earnest.

My interest in The Feels didn’t just come from Allie’s unorthodox methods but its mainstream success. It’s been profitable enough to expand into multiple cities, earning Allie a wave of mainstream media coverage (including Thrillist and The New York Times) that she’s parlayed into a profitable persona as a modern dating guru.

Allie defends the price of the event with the logic that a higher cost ensures people show up with serious intentions, because what better way to promote emotional availability than putting a prohibitive luxury price tag on it?

The Feels facilitation begins with us walking aimlessly around the room until we are instructed to stop and choose one person to make three minutes of prolonged eye contact with.

A man who is clearly at least fifteen years older than me locks eyes. I have a split second to assess his mala beads and earth-toned tunic.

Afterward, Allie glides past us in a long white linen dress, like the ghost of Etsy’s past, and offers what she clearly believes is an exceptional icebreaker for a singles event:

“What is something you’ve had to unlearn from your parents?”

Mala Beads goes first, He tells me that what he had to unlearn from his mother is the belief that youth guarantees a long life, because she died of breast cancer. He shares that during a recent ayahuasca journey, he saw her soul enter his body. His eyes mist as he explains how, after 38 years, it was remarkable to “see her again like that.”

Though I am not attracted to this man, I suddenly have many clarifying questions.

But just then, a bell chimes, and we are gently instructed to move on to our next partner.

When I heard the first question, I had planned to share that what I needed to unlearn from my mother was that Windex is not, in fact, an all-purpose cleaner.

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But after witnessing the sheer depth of my partner’s gaping mother wound, I realize that the baseline level of vulnerability required here is simply not something I have the emotional bandwidth to provide.

The next exercise involves pressing your back against a stranger’s and slowly leaning into each other, transferring your weight back and forth in what I believe is meant to simulate trust. Our next question is.

“What have you learned about your sexuality in the past six months?”

Like the first man, this second one answers immediately. He tells me he’s recently discovered a curiosity about men. Not romantically, he clarifies, but sexually, something about the “raw masculinity” of it appeals to him.

“Wow, okay… so you’ve explored that?” I ask, in what I believe is a very open-minded tone.

He tells me he hasn’t. But he would like to soon, ideally.

And then, unprompted, he adds that he’s looking for a woman who can “hold space” for this exploration.

The final exercise is a three-minute hug. Just prolonged, full-body contact with a stranger.

A man approaches me and I accept, praying he does not get a semi.

Now (if I may) here’s why The Feels ultimately unnerves me: everything about it, the eye gazing, the overly intimate questions manufactures the illusion of connection. It makes vulnerability a performance in a way that feels profound, but doesn’t actually translate into anything real. You leave feeling like something real just happened, when in fact it was intimacy, compressed and choreographed, with people who vanish the moment it ends.

Case in point: at the end of the event, I speak to the last man I hugged, a self-identified “Feels regular.” He explains to me, quite casually, how he’s learned to game the experience.

Because the exercises escalate in intimacy, he starts with the women he’s least attracted to, then gradually works his way up, so that by the time the final, extended hug arrives, he’s strategically paired with someone hotter.

And since participants are expected to approach one another, the structure tends to favor men who are comfortable being proactive, while sidelining women, who aren’t typically socialized to make split-second choices or deliver quick rejections under pressure.

Needless to say, I don’t feel compelled to linger after the event until I notice a woman approach Allie.

The woman is reverent. She explains that she drove three hours from New Jersey to attend The Feels because she wants to do this kind of work herself. She asks, earnestly, if Allie might have a few minutes to talk about what it’s like to be a founder, a facilitator, how she got started.

Allie places a hand on her heart.

“Wow,” she says, (with the same tone she’s used all night), “That’s really brave of you to share. However, I’m not in a place of relating right now… so I’m going to gently exit this conversation.”

And just like that, she does.

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Allie spends the next stretch of time circulating almost exclusively among the male attendees, touching arms, asking intimate questions, offering pieces of herself in the exact currency she had just declined.

Maybe my visceral reaction to female rejection is why I did what I did next, or maybe it’s just cuz’ I’m a cunt.

But I see Allie talking to Mala Beads and I insert myself into their conversation.

Mala Beads smiles warmly at me. “How did you find out about Allie?” he asks.

I smile back, lightly patting her shoulder.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I was just…curious. The New York trust fund scene is kind of fascinating. Not that I care about that part, I just respect what you’re building.”

I turn to smile at Allie.

She is ghost white.

Three days later, she emails me.

Allie asks if she can quote me in a Substack piece she’s writing.

The article is about how she resents being perceived as a trust fund baby, because she does not have a trust fund. She has an inheritance. Which, she clarifies, is different, because someone had to die in order for her to gain full access to her wealth.

Naturally, I read the entire thing.

Because what it lacks in self-awareness, it more than makes up for in entertainment value.

This was in 2023. Over the next three years, I run into Allie at parties every couple of months. She is cloyingly sweet to me, borderline sycophantic, “Tova! Oh my god, it’s so good to see you! I’ve been thinking about you. I miss you.”

This lasts for about ninety seconds.

Then, just as quickly, she exits, and for a while, I wonder if I’m ever going to witness any kind of growth from Allie Hoffman.

But Allie Hoffman doesn’t change.

I do.

I become internet famous, just enough to shift the dynamic. And Allie adjusts accordingly. She starts approaching me with a little more familiarity now, occasionally asking for favors, as if we’ve always had the kind of relationship where that would make sense.

One interaction in particular sticks out.

She comes up to me, concerned. She tells me she wants to “check in” about my recent weight loss. Not to make sure I’m okay, but to let me know that my body changing has been triggering for her. That it’s brought up her own issues with disordered eating.

I blink at her.

In three years, so much in my life has shifted, my work, my visibility, my sense of self.

And yet, Allie Hoffman remains exactly the same.

It opens up a new line of curiosity for me, one I hadn’t yet explored: what does the back end of The Feels actually look like? What does it mean to work for Allie Hoffman?

So I reach out to former employees.

There are many.

The churn rate at The Feels cannot be overstated. It is massive.

One former employee, in particular, walks me through their onboarding experience.

They tell me that from the start, expectations were made very clear. The creative director explained that in exchange for Allie’s (below-industry) hourly rate, employees should be prepared for: panicked 2 a.m. phone calls and long, spiraling voice notes about Allie’s emotional state. An expectation that employees would not only execute tasks, but also emotionally manage Allie herself, handholding her through basic work conversations because she struggled to regulate on her own.

And there were no real boundaries.

If the gender ratios at an event were off, staff members would be asked to step in, not as employees, but as participants. To fill out the room, quite literally becoming part of the product they were being underpaid to produce.

When I speak to other former employees, a pattern emerges.

They describe working at The Feels in eerily similar terms: somewhere between a cult and an MLM. Allie, they say, is incredibly skilled at articulating emotional language. She can make you feel seen, really seen. Her therapist-speak is almost hypnotic but you leave most interactions feeling, in some way, exploited.

Diving a little deeper into Allie’s past. I found something I genuinely was not prepared for.

Allie Hoffman, before The Feels, was kind of a badass.

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No, I mean it.

She used her resources, as a rich white woman, to fund and build legitimately impactful philanthropic work. She worked on poverty initiatives in Cambodia, contributed to projects addressing homelessness in the U.S., and seemed, by all accounts, deeply committed to making the world a better place.

And yet, almost none of it appears on her current website. Those years have been quietly stripped from her bio.

Most interestingly, during her time working on a prison reform initiative, she collaborated with Alicia Keys. Today, on her website, Alicia Keys is listed as a past “client” positioned in the same category as her relationship and dating work.

As if Alicia Keys went to Allie for dating tips

My curiosity pushes me further back. I reach out to people who worked with Allie at the height of her philanthropic career. I ask one former employee if they’re surprised she eventually pivoted into becoming a dating guru.

Their response is immediate.

“Allie was a nightmare to work with, even in her philanthropy heyday,” they tell me. “She had no boundaries back then either. A lot of it felt… aesthetic. She saw herself as this kind of Amal Clooney. What she wanted was optics. Being around high-net-worth people, having that air of moral superiority.”

They pause.

“It’s not surprising to me that she ended up here. When she hit her late 30s and was still single, The Feels felt like a more desperate attempt to get what she always wanted in the first place, an aesthetic she liked and a husband who checked all her boxes.”

“It’s very transparent,” they say. “The Feels is something she created for herself. A dating event without boundaries, for a woman who has no boundaries.”

A company is a reflection of its founder.

The Feels reflects Allie Hoffman completely; more theater than romance, more about optics than love. It treats people less like partners and more like participants on a conveyor belt, cycling them in and spitting them back out. What’s left is dating, stripped of everything that actually makes it work.

“Would you have sex with your adopted brother if he wasn’t gay?”

Zar’s question is so disorienting that I nearly choke on my bubble tea. Of all the things I expect my 24-year-old friend to ask me in an East Village boba shop, this isn’t one of them.

As I cough, trying to dislodge a tapioca pearl from my throat, Zar’s friend from acting school Emma pats my back. The three of us dissolve into laughter at the sheer absurdity of it. But as I regain my composure and Zar looks at me expectantly, waiting for an answer, Emma cuts in—

“Literally ignore her, her brain’s just cooked.”

I laugh, still catching my breath. “Where did you even get that question from?”

Emma smirks. “Porn?.”

I glance between them. “The kiddies are watching incest porn now?”

Zar shrugs. “I mean… not not.”

Later that night, I find myself absentmindedly looking up rates of incest porn viewership among Gen Z, only to realize it’s at an all-time high.

This discovery pulled me into a deeper rabbit hole. I found myself trying to understand why, among a generation too young to remember 9/11, incest porn had become so oddly ubiquitous. But the more closely I examined it, the less it read as simple sexual deviance. Instead, a different pattern began to emerge, one rooted not in perversion, but in social anxiety.

I’ll explain…

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I went viral for writing a article called, “A Guide To Giving Head: From a Jew Trained by Gays” because (surprise!) in depth advice about blowjobs is weirdly hard to find BUT technique isn’t everything. Giving head is as much about your pleasure as it is their’s.

So here’s what’s inside the article…

• How to use sour candies to make your blowjob more erotic

• How get a man to praise you while you’re going down on him

• Tips on making 69ing work for the both of you

• Toys you can incorporate to keep things fun on both sides

• Using a post-blowjob shower to shift from sexual energy into something more sensual and connected

69’ing

Ok, before I even start talking about the magical tantric powers of 69ing, I’m just going to say upfront that it’s only fun and feasible if you’re somewhat similar in height. Once you get past, like, a 6-inch height difference, it starts turning into a weird sexual game of Twister that makes sense for no one.

So if he’s 6’5” and you’re 5’3”, just skip ahead to the section on getting mutual pleasure with toys. You’ll still get the whole “double fun” situation without pulling a tendon.

Now, I really don’t recommend doing anything other than the classic man-on-bottom, woman-on-top position. I’m sure Cosmo has a 1,200-word article called “8 Different Ways to 6,9!” but realistically, both of your noses are going to be intimately close to the others asshole, so I’d recommend just sticking to the basics.

Before you’re even in position, something that really helps is using a pillow to elevate the guy’s hips and make everything more comfortable. Trust me, this goes a long way in reducing strain on your neck and back.

From there, the basics are pretty straightforward. In opposite-sex pairings, the woman is typically on top while the man is on his back. The logistics of giving head are more or less the same as usual.

What I will say is that it’s hard to concentrate on two things at once, so more often than not, one person is going to be doing a better job than the other. If your boo is absolutely crushing it and you’re starting to lose cognitive function, you can shift your focus to something simpler, like just the tip and the frenulum (that little stretchy band under the tip). It’s one of the most sensitive areas, so even minimal attention there can keep things feeling intense.

And if that feels like too much, even just holding him in your mouth and letting yourself moan into it, adds enough sensation to keep things feeling charged and engaging in the position.

Using hands free toys while you go down on him

Ok, this is probably my favorite part of this whole article: using hands-free toys when you’re going down on someone. It gives you all the mutual pleasure of 69’ing without any of the logistical chaos.

The key part here, though, is that it’s hands-free. My current favorite is the Bellesa Key vibe, which is basically an underwear attachment with a remote your partner can control while you’re going down on them (but also there are tons of hands toys out there you just need to do a little internet digging)

What I love about this is that you can encourage them to increase the speed as they get closer to cumming. It becomes this really intimate, easy way to stay attuned to how intense things are feeling for them, and to feel that build together without having to coordinate a full-body balancing act.

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