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The female orgasm recession got more visibility lately, when a young “looksmaxxing” influencer went viral for explaining that making a woman orgasm was essentially a bad investment. The additional 15 or 30 minutes it might require, he reasoned, could be more productively spent elsewhere, like taking an important phone call. I’m not even kidding.

What is remarkable is less the statement itself than how neatly it fits into a larger philosophy of heterosexual sex that has been flourishing online, one in which intimacy is understood through the language of markets, leverage, status and diminishing returns. Fresh & Fit host Myron Gaines has argued that a man who goes down on his girlfriend is being subservient in a segment he called "Even GOD doesn't care about a woman's orgasm."The implication is revealing: giving a woman pleasure is not merely an inefficient use of time, but potentially a surrender of power. Yikes.

Now this would be easier to laugh off as extremely-online nonsense if heterosexual men were actually delivering. It’s 2026, and the numbers still aren’t close. A study of nearly 25,000 American adults found men orgasm up to 95% of the time during sex, compared to 65% for women. The women’s orgasm recession shows up in every single age group. Two decades of better sex ed, more open conversations about consent, and mainstream awareness that the clitoris exists have done shockingly little to close it.

Men don’t even seem to know it’s happening. In one national survey, 85 percent of men reported that their partner had orgasmed the last time they had sex, while only 64 percent of women say they did. The discrepancy is almost touching in its optimism: an enormous population of men appears to be leaving sexual encounters under the impression that everyone had a wonderful time, when they may have been the only ones who did.

And it’s not for lack of information. We know, with almost comical specificity, what helps close the gap: oral sex, manual stimulation, kissing, the basic acknowledgment that penetration is not the only activity available to two naked people. In one survey of more than 50,000 adults, 80 percent of straight women and 91 percent of lesbian women reported orgasming when sex included a combination of genital stimulation, deep kissing and oral sex. And yet roughly one in three men still believed intercourse was the most effective way to make a woman orgasm. If I had emojis on my keyboard, this is where I would insert the facepalm emoji. The information isn’t missing. We have simply accumulated decades of increasingly specific knowledge about female pleasure while heterosexual sex remains remarkably resistant to reorganizing itself around any of it.

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We need to talk about the head gap. Research on heterosexual couples has found that women are twice as likely to give oral sex without receiving it, an imbalance made stranger by the fact that men report enjoying giving oral sex more than women report enjoying giving it to men. There is something almost impressive about this arrangement: heterosexual culture has managed to produce a sexual norm in which women disproportionately perform an act they enjoy less, for partners who don’t even need it to climax. Meanwhile, the act that men apparently enjoy giving, and that can actually help close the orgasm gap, remains somehow negotiable. The head gap, like the orgasm gap, starts to look less mysterious the longer you stare at it. We know what women like, we know what helps them come, and we have simply organized heterosexual sex around something else.

So why aren’t more men buying vibrators? The vibrator has somehow acquired a strange symbolic power in heterosexual sex. For some men, its appearance in bed seems to register as an accusation, evidence that whatever they were doing before it arrived had been insufficient. But this requires believing that sex is primarily a demonstration of male competence, rather than a collaborative attempt to make everyone involved feel good. Nobody considers a whisk an insult to a chef or a power drill a humiliation for a carpenter! Tools are useful precisely because human beings figured out that getting the desired result matters more than proving you could have achieved it with your bare hands. But somehow the vibrator is stigmatized rather than commonly bought or used by men with their partner.

The orgasm gap, after all, is not suffering from a lack of information. We know that women who receive oral sex, manual stimulation and more varied forms of sexual attention orgasm more frequently. We also know that women are perfectly capable of producing the desired result themselves. A 2025 study of women over 60 found that frequent sex toy users were significantly more likely to report consistently orgasming. There is something both encouraging and faintly ridiculous about reaching this point in the scientific literature: the female orgasm exists! We know how to produce it! So why are we still acting weird about using the very tools that help us get there? Somehow the vibrator remains coded as a backup plan, an intervention brought in when sex has failed, rather than what it more obviously is: technology that makes sex better. In some bedrooms, it’s even considered taboo, despite being the main way women can achieve climax.

Which leaves us with the less scientific question of why women should continue treating their own pleasure as something another person gets to determine. Bringing a vibrator into bed does not have to constitute an emergency intervention or a referendum on anyone’s sexual abilities. It can simply be part of sex. The female orgasm recession begins to look considerably more manageable once women stop waiting for the market to correct itself.

Which, conveniently, brings me to a vibrator I personally love, and the sponsor helping support the research and writing behind a piece I’ve been wanting to write for a very long time!

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I should disclose that I have personally diversified my portfolio. While certain men are conducting cost benefit analyses on whether my orgasm generates sufficient returns, I have the Womanizer Liberty Next, a compact clitoral stimulator whose Pleasure Air 3D technology is designed to mimic oral sex, you know the thing that every study shows improves your chance of having an orgasm?! It has three depth levels and eight intensity settings, and is equally excellent whether you want to take matters into your own hands or bring it into bed with someone else.

This is also where I would like to formally release men from the completely unnecessary burden of competing with vibrators. The Liberty Next can be something you use together. In fact, nothing says sexual confidence quite like being interested in the outcome rather than obsessed with receiving sole credit for it. Alone, together, whatever works. We are trying to end a recession here.

Speaking of recessions, I’m excited to offer you a discount because, at this point, we could all use a little economic relief. Use code LIZ20 for 20% off. Consider it your personal stimulus package :)

If you want to hear from one of the good guys, check out this Boy Problems episode. I sat down with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, host of Recess Therapy, to talk about what kids can teach us about love, friendship, vulnerability, and the emotional honesty so many adults lose along the way. It’s funny, unexpectedly moving, and one of my favorite conversations we’ve had. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

x Liz

The Cut recently published an essay that ricocheted across group chats, and if you haven’t read it, here’s the gist: gen z women are paying rent for boyfriends who don’t work. Young women are running the household, managing the emotional labor, and functionally becoming a second mother to grown men who call themselves “partners.” While the internet overflows with “stay-at-home girlfriend” content, young women self-pedestalizing their lifestyle of bottomless matcha and pilates, bankrolled by a rich boyfriend, there’s a quieter trend nobody seems eager to talk about: men coasting off their girlfriend’s salary and domestic labor while she works herself to the bone.

The piece is being framed as an indictment of men, and it’s not wrong about that part. The dating pool is rough right now. We talk about it every week on our podcast Boy Problems.

Chanté Joseph’s said it perfectly in her essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing?” Her mega viral piece kicked off a conversation about why having a boyfriend isn’t the status symbol it once was, and why some women are actively hiding their relationships, both online and off. But The Cut essay made me feel something different. I found myself feeling an uncomfortable feeling. I almost felt more embarrassed for the women than for the men. The men were acting like babies, but why were the girlfriends acting like mommies? Nobody was making them hold a diaper bag, so why were they voluntarily doing it? If women don’t want man-children, why are they adopting them? As I scrolled through hundreds of comments roasting men who turn their girlfriends into moms, I couldn’t stop thinking: what if the most embarrassing thing about modern womanhood isn’t the men we’re with, but who we become around them? There’s a part of the gender revolution that women rarely want to admit, that I myself ignored for years, the part of us that keeps us tethered to losers.

To be abundantly clear, I’m on the side of women. They did not create this problem. Overly nurturing women feel compelled to baby their boyfriend’s for a number of reasons.

One of the reasons women are becoming grown men’s moms instead of their girlfriends, is what I like to call the gender swag gap. It’s the defining problem of modern heterosexual dating. We have data showing male underemployment, declining workforce participation, the retreat into video games and porn, and a generation of men who seem stuck in prolonged adolescence existing alongside a generation of women who had to become more educated, more independent, and more ambitious than society wanted them to be. One group got free from the patriarchy, and the other seeped more deeply into it.This profound gap is creating a heterosexual pickle that threatens the very future of romance. Something is broken, and while women aren’t the ones who broke it, they are expected to lower to shield men from the responsibility of solving it.

“Men are lonely” has become a conversation that too often ends by asking what women should do about it instead of what men should do about it. This is why so many women are mothering men. We’ve grown up being taught that women are the ones can change men. But when it comes to our dynamics in heterosexual partnerships, the idea that women are valid rehab centers for men who are drunk on the patriarchy is like poison for romance. A dating strategy that depends on men’s hypothetical growth is not how you build vibrant relationships.

But while women are always expected to solve the things that men broke, the discourse leaves out one thing: their agency. Sure, gen z men certainly seem to be expecting women to cater to them, but if women have the money and the power in the relationship, why are they giving it up? And of course I know there are numerous social forces at play that strip them of that power. The way women and men are socialized is very different and women are encouraged to over-nurture others and are punished when they don’t. But are women really powerless or did they just forget how powerful they really are? If we want real change, we need to acknowledge the freedom women have. And no longer making it women’s job to get men sober from the patriarchy is a good place to start.

The patriarchy is making men sick, but it’s the hope women keep holding onto, that these men will eventually get sober from it, that’s making them even sicker.

And I say this as a woman who wrote an entire ass book about believing men can change. Women have to come to terms that the men in the dating pool are the men in the dating pool. And no amount of training wheels will make them suitable partners unless they decide to free themselves from the shackles of their minds.

So ladies, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this: the only way to stop being a man’s mommy is to stop being his mommy. The conversation has become almost entirely about the men who lack ambition and expect women to fix their lives. And we absolutely need to talk about that. But why aren’t we talking about the women who accept those terms and conditions and participate in their own mommyfication? If the system is broken and men are clinging to patriarchal ideals of masculinity instead of rejecting them, the rational response isn’t to move into the wreckage and start doing its laundry. The harder response is telling him he can only stay over if he starts doing his own laundry, and meaning it. And if he can’t, having enough self-respect to leave that relationship, and the trust in yourself to know you’ll be okay, if not better without him.

I used to think the second half of the gender revolution was going to be about men. I wrote an entire book about it because I genuinely believed that if enough men read the books, went to therapy, and did the work, they’d become better partners for themselves and for the women who love them. That hasn’t happened, at least not on any timeline young women can reasonably build their their around. If anything, I think the rise of masculinity gurus who are red-pill adjacent have created a permission structure where men are encouraged to see themselves as victims of forces they have very little interest in changing. It means con artists like Andrew Tate prey on young men and make them even less suitable partners for the women they’re trying to attract. This is why I’ve come to believe the relentless focus on the male loneliness crisis has done irreparable damage to women’s rights, and to what’s left of intimacy between the sexes.

I think a lot of women are still operating on the assumption that if they just give it enough time, enough patience, enough gentle mothering, the guy will eventually become the man he was supposedly always capable of being. But that’s not an equal partnership, in fact to quote the great philosophers of our time, Melanie on Love Island, "You're playing Build-a-Bear with that bitch, bro."

You cannot nag a man into becoming a partner. Too many women date men like they're rescue dogs, convinced that with enough patience, enough understanding, and enough second chances, he'll eventually stop biting. But the truth is that men will never know that they’re falling behind if women keep building them ramps. The fastest way to make a man grow up is to stop being the reason he doesn't have to.

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Maybe the second half of the gender revolution isn’t about men changing at all. Maybe it’s about women doing the harder, less romantic work of getting explicit about what they need, and being genuinely willing, not performatively willing, to walk away when it’s not there. That means treating financial stability, basic domestic competence, and emotional maturity as non-negotiable minimums, not aspirational qualities you coach someone into over three years of unpaid labor. It means noticing on date four that he doesn’t have a job and hasn’t looked for one, and understanding that this is information, not a redemption arc that’s just waiting to happen. A plant that needs enough water to grow…

And I get it, the hard part, the actually hard part, is the alone part. It’s much easier to be busy mothering a boyfriend than to sit with the discomfort of not having one. Managing a man-child gives young women a role, a sense of purpose, and a story where we feel needed. I get it. I’ve been there.

Being single and getting your needs met through friendships, work, community, and your own resourcefulness doesn’t hit the same. It doesn’t get likes on social media. Your family might not approve. They might whisper after you leave, wondering what’s wrong with you that you’re still single. Loser men in government like JD Vance, will call you an overeducated cat lady. But that’s just because you set yourself free, and they’re jealous that they’re still in jail. Seeing you free reminds them that they’re not. And they hate it. They don’t hate you, they hate themselves. So being single and child-free when you’re a women can feel like failure even when it’s the opposite. But that discomfort is the toll booth on the way to actually having a relationship worth having, instead of a dependent you’ve dressed up as a partner.

And by the way, none of this lets men off the hook. The conditions producing this crisis of male development are real, and someone should absolutely keep writing about them. But women don’t control the economy, the education system, or the culture that raised a generation of men to expect moms instead of partners. Women did not create the loneliness crisis because we are not in power. When women try to do the smallest thing we get told to remember our place, but when it comes to solving men’s gargantuan problems we’re told we are magically all powerful. Which one is it?? Are we powerful or are we not?? Women don't control much. But we do control who we let into our apartments, our bank accounts, our beds, and our lives. We need to start treating those decisions like national security.

Raising the bar has to mean being willing to lose people over it. Otherwise the bar isn't moving. The system doesn't change because women write think pieces about it or men nod along. It changes when enough women refuse to participate in it. You can't make a man become someone else. You can decide whether he gets access to your body, your home, your time, your attention, your peace. That decision is more powerful than we've been taught to believe.

If you enjoyed this article, you can hear more of my thoughts on the topic on this week’s episode of Boy Problems. I dive deeper into why this conversation is especially timely due to some breaking news in my personal life…

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Women are carefully watching the Lindsay Clancy trial for reasons that have very little to do with true crime. They are watching because it has become a national conversation about the outer edge of postpartum mental illness, and because every new headline raises the same unsettling question: what happens when a mother says she’s not okay? Then, after Hayden Panettiere’s death, millions of people found themselves watching old interviews in which she described what happened after she publicly disclosed that she had postpartum depression, including her account that Neutrogena ended their relationship after she spoke openly about it. One story is about a woman accused of an unimaginable crime, and being failed by a medical system unequipped to handle maternal health. The other is about a woman who described a common medical condition and faced consequences for even mentioning it. They are radically different stories, but they arrive at the same cultural moment carrying an eerily similar message: motherhood remains one of the few experiences where telling the truth about your mental health is dangerous.

That is what made Matt Walsh's claim this week that post-partum depression doesn’t even exist feel less like a hot take than an act of calculated contempt. He argued that a "sizable portion" of postpartum depression isn't hormonal at all, but what happens when selfish women are forced to put someone else's needs before their own. It is a remarkable accusation to level at women whose bodies have spent nine months growing another human being, whose organs have rearranged themselves to sustain that life, who are surviving on fractured sleep while feeding another person with their own bodies, often with less support than mothers have had at any other point in human history. Faced with all of that, Walsh looked at their suffering and concluded the problem wasn't the conditions they were living under, it was their attitude.

Somewhere in the Paleolithic era, long before psychiatry, maternity leave or a man in a suit deciding when a mom should bounce back after growing a whole human, a woman gave birth surrounded by people who had already done it. Other women read her face before she said a word. Someone took the baby while she slept, someone shoved food into her hands before hunger became one more invisible job she had to manage, and someone noticed her hands shaking from exhaustion because there were enough people paying attention for someone to actually notice. She was not expected to recover alone because recovery was never imagined as a solitary thing. A new baby reorganized the entire community, not just one woman’s and her husband if he gets time off work.

Anthropologists call this alloparenting: the reality that human beings evolved to raise children collectively rather than inside isolated nuclear households. It’s easy to treat that as an interesting historical detail, but it’s our biological infrastructure. Human infants require extraordinary amounts of care, and human mothers have always depended on more than one pair of hands to provide it. For most of our history, the village wasn’t optional, it was primordial. It wasn’t just about emotional support, it was about physical safety.

Now imagine dropping that same woman into a third-floor apartment with a newborn, a partner who vanished back to work after a few measly days as though his job were the real emergency, grandparents scattered two time zones away, a few weeks of unpaid leave already bleeding out, and an endless chorus of people telling her to "enjoy every moment," ignoring her exhaustion entirely. She wouldn’t conclude that she had entered a more enlightened civilization. She would probably conclude that she had been abandoned. And yet, men like Matt Walsh argue the problem is the modern woman, even though she's raising children with less communal support than her ancestors ever had, and normalized fathers being optional instead of indispensable.

The abandonment of mothers has become so normalized we think it’s resilience. We celebrate women for doing it all. We applaud their strength. Then, when the predictable consequences of isolation begin to appear, we diagnose the mother instead of the conditions she’s been asked to survive. We assume something is wrong with her rather than asking what kind of society expects one person to do the work that entire communities once shared. And if we’re Matt Walsh we say that her diagnosis isn’t even real, it’s in her head.

While men like Matt Walsh beleive that postpartum depression isn’t real, it’s a serious medical condition, one that can require therapy, medication, hospitalization, or a combination of all three. It is also remarkably common, affecting one in seven mothers, with many more experiencing postpartum anxiety or other perinatal mood disorders. But what receives far less attention is the environment in which that illness unfolds. Sleep deprivation, chronic stress and social isolation isn't incidental. They are the conditions under which millions of women are expected to begin motherhood after we privatized what was once humanity's most collective job. We replaced the village with one exhausted mother, and then we blamed her for collapsing under a weight no human being evolved to carry alone. And this is even worse for non-white women. Black mothers experience postpartum depression at disproportionately high rates, with estimates ranging from 29% to 44%, and yet they are far less likely than white mothers to be diagnosed promptly or receive adequate treatment. And if you think white mothers are afraid to admit to wanting to harm them or their kids, for Black mothers, who risk having their children taken away far more than their white counterparts, asking for help is not even a possibility.

Modern parenting asks one or two adults to perform work that entire communities once shared. We have devalued and privatized care while leaving the expectations attached to care almost untouched. Mothers are still expected to be emotionally available, physically present, professionally ambitious, financially productive, and deeply grateful. This just isn’t sustainable at all. No wonder women are breaking.

The insults made by Walsh and other right-wing political hacks, which are arguments made by this very White House by the way, perform a real function. If postpartum depression can be explained as a character defect that millions of women who have never met each other, just happen to share, then nothing larger has to change. Employers don’t have to offer longer leave. Governments don’t have to use your taxes to make sure mothers have healthcare. Cities don’t have to become places where extended families can afford to live near each other. Fathers don’t have to rethink how care is divided. The problem can remain comfortably contained inside the individual woman. If she failed, then we don't have to admit we did. We have a long history of diagnosing women instead of indicting the world they've been asked to survive. The oldest trick in the book is to call a woman mad so no one has to answer for what was done to her.

And while Matt Walsh obsesses over mothers' character, researchers find that the one thing that predicts post-partum distress is not her personality, it’s whether she has people around her willing to help. Research has found that women with stronger practical and emotional support after birth are significantly less likely to develop postpartum depression, while declining support after childbirth predicts worsening mental health. A large California study found that mothers who consistently received emotional and practical support had about half the rate of postpartum anxiety and depression symptoms compared with mothers who lacked that support. In one prospective study, women with the lowest levels of postnatal social support were nearly ten times more likely to experience postpartum depression than women with the highest levels of support. The science has identified dozens of risk factors for postpartum depression, and shocker, shelfishness isn't one of them.

The timing of the Clancy trial and the renewed attention to Panettiere’s story makes another reality difficult to ignore. Mothers are constantly absorbing lessons about what honesty costs. Clancy’s story raises agonizing questions about whether the health system can support mothers before tragedy occurs, while the other reminds women that publicly acknowledging postpartum depression can carry very serious professional consequences. It isn’t difficult to understand why so many mothers reserve their most frightening thoughts for whispered private conversations with friends rather than institutions, and people who could actually help.

So no this isn’t about women being selfish, it’s about women being burned out and scared to say it. The woman in the Paleolithic was not stronger than the woman standing in her kitchen today with throw-up on her shirt and three hours of sleep behind her. She was simply surrounded by more people. We like to imagine that modern mothers should be able to outperform their ancestors because medicine has advanced and technology has improved, when we’ve just made the job harder than it has ever been. We removed the people who used to share the work, then convinced ourselves that struggling under the weight says something about the woman instead of us.

This is why this week’s headlines weight so heavy on women, especially mothers or those who care about them. Mothers are trying to keep their heads above water, and Matt Walsh's contribution is another hand pushing them under. Mothers haven’t changed and become more self-centered, some men have just become increasingly comfortable asking them to do one of humanity’s oldest collective jobs almost entirely alone. When they falter, we reach for diagnoses, arguments, and moral judgments before we ask the simpler question our ancestors might have recognized immediately: why wasn’t someone there to help?

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If this conversation resonated with you, I think you'll enjoy this week's episode of Boy Problems! I sat down with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the host of Recess Therapy, to talk about what children can teach us about love, friendship, vulnerability, and the emotional honesty so many adults lose along the way. It's funny, unexpectedly moving, and one of my favorite conversations we've had. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I used to think I was an idiot.

I spent years assuming everyone else was smarter than me, which meant I stayed quiet far more than I should have. I wouldn’t speak up in meetings, I’d hold back at dinner parties, and I’d automatically assume the loudest person in the room probably knew the most. Looking back, that belief shaped a lot more than I realized because it made me confuse confidence with intelligence, in myself and others. I realized I’d spent years trying to seem intelligent when the people I actually admired were doing something completely different. Once I figured it out, I saw it everywhere. The people who stay with you after a conversation usually aren’t the ones with the most impressive facts, or the people who brag about the New Yorker article they read. They’re the ones who make you feel like the world is more interesting than it was an hour ago. They’re paying attention to the world but they’re also paying attention to YOU, they’re asking questions, following tiny tangents, and getting genuinely pumped when they learn something new. That’s a completely different kind of intelligence, a way more enticing form of smarts, and one that’s totally available to us all.

This week's episode of the podcast is all about this. We talk about how to become the kind of person people can't stop talking to, why curiosity is one of the most underrated qualities you can develop, and the simple shifts that can make the rest of your summer feel a whole lot richer. My hope is that instead of watching the season fly by, you end it feeling like you actually lived it.

Summer always feels like the perfect time to wander into new habits. When I was younger I’d accidentally become more interesting every summer without even trying because I was free to explore. I’d wander into bookstores, read random magazines, spend hours outside, overhear conversations, and get bored enough that my brain started making connections on its own. None of it felt productive while it was happening, but somehow I’d come out the other side feeling like my world had expanded.

Now every empty second gets filled before it has a chance to become anything. The second we’re standing in line or sitting alone for thirty seconds, we’ve got our phones out. We’ve gotten so good at avoiding boredom that we’ve accidentally started avoiding one of the biggest drivers of curiosity too.

Before I became a journalist, I worked as a research assistant in LSE’s behavioral science department, and one idea from this field that stuck with me for years i s that we spend so much time trying to become more disciplined and think ourselves into new habits, when it’s usually easier to redesign the environment around us instead. Instead of asking, “How do I become someone who reads more?” ask, “How do I make reading easier than scrolling?” For me it was about moving my library app where tiktok used to be. Or leaving a book on my pillow so that I have to move it if I decide not to read it. Your environment usually wins, whether you like it or not. So make it easier for you to do the things you actually want to do!

So here are four things I'm actually trying this summer to make sure I’m intellectually nourished instead of wasting the summer away scrolling. I'd love to hear yours too!! Leave a comment with something that's made you feel more curious, more engaged with the world, or just more alive lately. One of my favorite parts of this community is how much we all end up learning from each other, so if something has worked for you, share it! Someone else might need to hear it :)

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1. Schedule boredom.

Go for a walk without a podcast. I know, crazy!! Notice how much you notice!! Sit somewhere without immediately pulling your phone out. Let yourself be bored long enough that your brain starts entertaining itself again. Wonder usually shows up a few minutes after discomfort, but most of us never stick around long enough to find out. The more we fill time, the faster time goes by. So when you have resistance over being bored, remember that you are making your summer last longer just by not trying to fill every minute.

2. Quit more books.

I know that sounds terrible, but forcing yourself through books you hate just teaches your brain that learning is miserable. I started reading a book this summer that BUMMED ME OUT. Instead of just giving up on it and choosing another one, I ended up scrolling more. So give up on the idea that finishing a book is necessary!! Give yourself permission not to. The goal isn’t finishing books. It’s reading. So if you’re more likely to read by giving up on a boring book, DO IT.

3. Ask the dumb question.

The best way to become smart is to stop trying to avoid looking dumb. The smartest people I know are constantly admitting they don’t know things. They’re the first people to interrupt someone in the group and say, “Wait, can you explain that?” I LOVE when people do this because most of the time I didn’t get it either! Trying to sound smart is the best way to kill curiosity. Asking questions usually starts the best conversations.

4. Go find something that makes you feel small.

For the very first time in my entire life, I am attempting summer fridays, by working in the morning and then taking the afternoon off to to the beach or spend time in nature. It’s not only improved my wellbeing, it’s improved my productivity! So go look at the ocean, or go to a planetarium, or just stand under some giant trees. If it’s hot, go to a museum they have AC!! The fastest way I’ve found to get out of my own head is remembering how unbelievably big the world. Perspective does something that productivity hacks never will, and sometimes the best way to expand your mind is to remember how much exists outside of it, outside of you.

I think that’s really the whole idea. I don’t want to finish the summer knowing a bunch of random facts I can repeat to people. I’d rather finish it asking better questions than I was asking when it started because every good question makes your world a little bigger than it was before.

If that question about why some people feel so intellectually magnetic made you curious too, we go much deeper into it in this week’s episode. It’s probably one of my favorite conversations we’ve had in a while.

I'm dating someone who takes good pictures of me, and I'm gonna be honest, it's completely destabilized me. It sounds like such a small thing, but I don't think it's actually about photos. I think it's about attention, memory, and how unbelievably low the bar has become for men. We unpacked all of it on the latest episode of Boy Problems.

For the record, I’m not discombobulated because the pictures are amazing, that part is great. Im freaking out because I realized I'd accepted that this was just one of those things women weren't supposed to expect from men. One day he took a photo of me that he loved and I didn't. I mentioned, almost as an aside, that I don't love how my lips tend to go downward from certain angles and that it’s taken from an angle I usually don’t like. He told me the angles he also hates of himself, and that was basically the whole conversation. Maybe a minute. I never brought it up again. But he somehow remembered. He will naturally stand on the side I like. If he catches me making an expression I hate, he'll take another. Sometimes he'll look at a photo and delete it before showing me because he knows I won’t like it. It's such an unremarkable thing to do that it almost sounds stupid to write about because it feels ridiculous to make a big deal out of something this small, but I think that's exactly why it matters. When someone tells you something about themselves, you remember it. But I was genuinely caught off guard by it because I’d spent years treating bad boyfriend photos as one of those immutable facts of heterosexual life, like every woman just had to accept that if she wanted a nice picture of herself, she’d probably have to ask another woman.

It turns out the issue was never that men are incapable of learning how their partners like to be photographed. It’s that somewhere along the way we decided this was too insignificant to expect them to learn in the first place.

@alexandramadison_Suddenly, Jon can’t turn left

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Think about it, the single most common meme format on the internet right now popular in the summer or after a honeymoon is the “look at the terrible photos my boyfriend took of me,” showing a woman cropped at the ankles, half in shadow, phone tilted so the landmark behind her looks like it’s about to fall on her is not actually about men being bad at photography. Men can take good pictures of us. I now have proof. They really can learn. I mean the evidence is sitting right there in my camera roll. So what’s actually going on here?

And by the way the version of this meme I find even more revealling isn’t the solo “my boyfriend ruined my photo” post, it’s the side-by-side. What I keep seeing online is the honeymoon album where the wife’s photos of her husband look like they belong in a magazine, and his photos of her look like maybe evidence photography. She’s found the light, waited for him to stop squinting, taken multiple shots to catch the good one, cropped it after, added a filter maybe that makes his best features pop even more. The boyfriend’s version of the same job is one blurry frame where she’s mid-blink and the ocean is cut off. The point isn't that one person is naturally gifted at taking pictures. Nobody loses all visual judgment the second they point a camera at their girlfriend. What's striking is how differently the task exists in each person's imagination. One of them arrived already understanding that part of loving someone is paying attention to how they'll remember themselves later. The other often seems to treat the photograph as an obligation to get through, not an act of care in itself.

It’s the same low-grade passive aggression as the wedding-cake-in-the-face trend posted online, where a man “playfully” ruins her makeup and hair on the one day she asked to look a certain way. She spends months planning how she wants to look on one of the biggest days of her life, and the punchline is... ruining it. Everyone calls it a joke but there's something revealing about how often "just kidding" seems to involve making a woman feel a little smaller, a little uglier, or a little more embarrassed than she wanted to be, not by a random man but by the man who claims to love her.

The more I thought about it, the less convincing the usual explanation became. Women are told that men just don’t care about photos. At the same time, we spend decades describing men as the more visual sex, the ones who can lose themselves in systems, statistics, maps, engines, lineups, and endless trivia about whatever happens to interest them. Anyone who’s ever listened to a man enthusiastically explain a hobby knows the male brain is perfectly capable of storing an astonishing amount of detail. Which makes the bad-boyfriend-photo phenomenon so strange. We’re somehow expected to believe that the same person who can instantly recognize a car model from half a block away or remember the outcome of a game from years ago can’t hold onto one sentence about how his girlfriend likes to be photographed. Men never seem to run out of memory for the things they care about.

It’s remarkable how often the supposed limits of male cognition seem to coincide with the things women care about.

The things we keep are usually the things we’ve decided are worth keeping. My boyfriend didn’t display some rare emotional gift. He simply treated one small preference I mentioned as information worth remembering, and months later it was still shaping the way he reached for the camera. What surprised me wasn’t that he remembered, it was how completely I’d accepted the idea that most men wouldn’t!!

So let's retire the myth that men are just hopeless with cameras. You're not!! You know how to make things look good when you care about them. Ladies, let's raise the bar. And gentlemen, let's raise the phone. I no longer believe you don't know how to take a flattering photo of your girlfriend!!! You do!!! Find the light, take ten instead of one, learn the angle. The bar has been on the floor long enough.

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami on Saturday, after U.K. prosecutors filed a wave of new charges against them. Andrew is facing 42 in total, including rape, sex trafficking, assault, and offenses relating to indecent images of a child. Tristan is facing 17. They are now in custody awaiting extradition to Britain, where seven women reported them and where police have spent 16 years building a case, which is to say that seven women have been waiting much longer than the internet has.

That is the news!! But here is the detail the internet cannot let go of, and I am not going to pretend I am above it, because I am not: Andrew Tate met this moment in a kicky purple number with an open neckline, cropped pants, and slip-on shoes. An outfit your aunt definitely wore to a wine tasting this summer. A man who spent years announcing that women belong in the kitchen, arrested in an outfit that belongs absolutely nowhere.

It matters that the Tate brothers were arrested in tight purple capri pants, because the Tate brothers’ entire identity depends on a masculinity that has to be performed constantly because it does not exist anywhere else. A thing that is real does not require this much production, this many ring lights, this many bot accounts manufacturing a populairty you do not have. But on Saturday, with no warning and no time to get into costume, the world saw what the Tate brothers look like when the performance is off: two guys in tight pants and little shoes, doing exactly what the officers told them to do. This is not who they have been pretending to be to the young impressionable men they robbing blind with scam classes and fake universities.

Andrew Tate has spent years insisting that there is one correct way to be a man, and that he would sell it to you. He sold masculinity as a members-only club with him as the body guard standing at the door. But then the photo drops, and he is standing there in unflattering purple capris and loafers. Andrew Tate looks less like an apex male and more like a millennial woman in 2014 meeting the girls for happy hour straight from the office, moments away from ordering an espresso martini and asking if anyone wants to split a caesar salad.

And we know it’s a lie. We’ve done the research. Your subscription funded it! His ex-girlfriend, who sued him for assault and battery, came on our podcast and said he does not even believe what he himself says. That it is all a show, and the show is for money. Which is the real thing the capri pants tell us: Andrew Tate is not an alpha male. Andrew Tate performs a kind of drag of the alpha male, an exaggerated costume of manhood, staged for an audience of unsuspecting young men who pay him for the privilege of believing the costume is real. She would know. She saw him with the costume off long before the U.S. Marshals did. You can watch that conversation here.

That’s the thing about the manosphere’s masculinity: it is drag. It is exaggerated, costumed, hyper-stylized gender performance, staged for an audience, sustained by props. The cars, the cigars, the sunglasses indoors, the brother beside you in a matching outfit the camera that can never ever stop running. RuPaul has said that we are all born naked and the rest is drag, and no one on earth proves the point harder than a man who cannot appear in public without his full masculinity costume assembled. The difference, and it is the only difference, is that drag queens know. Drag is honest about being a performance. That honesty is the art. Andrew Tate performs womanhood’s exact mirror image, manhood as wig and padding and contour, and then sells tickets by insisting it is not a performance at all, that it is simply what a man is, and that your teenage son can have it for a monthly fee. A drag queen would never.

So yes, Andrew Tate getting arrested felt great. But Andrew Tate getting arrested in an outfit you wore on a 2007 girls' trip, in a middle seat on Spirit Airlines, feels even better. Women have always known that his masculinity was drag. Now the whole world has proof too.

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Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the military will now require annual testosterone deficiency screenings for all active-duty service members age 30 and older. Hegseth framed the move as necessary to ensure troops maintain the “biological foundation” to fight, and described it as a way to keep the force on the “leading edge of lethality.” Service members flagged as deficient will have the option, not the requirement, to start testosterone replacement therapy.

Cool. Very scientific!! Very serious. Let’s talk about why this is bonkers.

Roughly 5.6 percent of men between 30 and 79 have testosterone deficiency, a condition linked to fatigue, muscle loss, and mood changes. That’s a real thing doctors treat. What’s less clear is why the Pentagon is turning it into an annual mandatory screening for an entire branch of the federal government. The Pentagon did not respond to questions about what research underpinned the decision, and notably, has not said whether female troops will be screened for declining estrogen as they enter perimenopause, a comparably universal, comparably natural, comparably age-related hormonal shift that apparently does not seem to interest them in at all.

So to be clear, the pentagon is not like “hormones matter, let’s take care of everyone’s.” It’s specifically, deliberately about men. and them fitting a very dystopian model of what they think a man should be like, one that is in their words must be “lethal.” ALSO THIS IS GENDER AFFIRMING CARE BTW.

While the US government is very worried about testosterone levels, here’s what the Pentagon has not prioritized. Federal law bars the Defense Department from providing abortion care at military facilities, or from having their healthcare cover it, except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the pregnant person’s life, restrictions that trace back to the Hyde Amendment and are extremely hard to prove. Their insurance does not cover abortion for fetal abnormalities or mental health reasons, and troops who need that care have to leave the military health system entirely and pay out of pocket.

It gets worse. In January 2025, the Pentagon quietly rescinded the policy that had covered travel costs, including transportation, lodging, and food, for service members who had to go off-base for reproductive health care, including abortion and IVF. So a servicewoman stationed somewhere without access now has to find and fund that trip herself.

Meanwhile, a program to test and treat testosterone levels in men gets rolled out as a readiness priority, no questions about underlying research required.

And to be clear, nobody is arguing men with a diagnosed hormone deficiency shouldn’t get treated. The issue is what gets fast-tracked as a national security priority, announced in a slickly produced video with no underlying research required.

It’s not about the money!! The Pentagon clearly has money. It’s about what the Pentagon has decided is worth spending it on, and it just told everyone, in its own words, exactly what that is.

And while we’re pretending this is all about biology, it’s worth remembering that testosterone replacement therapy isn’t some magical masculinity serum. It comes with real medical tradeoffs. It can suppress sperm production, sometimes dramatically lowering fertility which feels like a really weird thing to force on men who are of reproductive age. It can cause testicular shrinkage because your body stops producing as much of its own testosterone. Testosterone also doesn’t turn men into raging, violent monsters, despite decades of pop culture mythology. I talk about all the research in my book. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that medically prescribed testosterone therapy causes men to become more aggressive or dangerous.

That’s what makes the logic here so revealing. The administration can’t simultaneously treat testosterone as the sacred biological essence of manhood while promoting a treatment that intentionally alters men’s hormonal systems and has well-known effects on fertility and testicular size. The science is more nuanced than the politics.

More broadly, this fits a pattern we’ve been watching for years. Late-stage patriarchy doesn’t look like confident men running the world. It looks like institutions becoming increasingly preoccupied with policing, measuring, and medically managing masculinity itself. Patriarchy isn’t just a prison for women. It’s a prison for men too.

And if you’re wondering about priorities, remember that the current administration’s CDC cuts have undermined work on infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response, leading to a mysterious explosive diarrhea disease ranging across the nation, while the federal government somehow found the urgency to launch annual testosterone screening for healthy military personnel. Apparently the most explosive thing facing America isn’t an infectious disease. It’s men who don’t fall in line.

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If you need a break from all this bullshit, watch our first live show with Marc Maron and David Farrier!!!

Quick vibe check on American democracy: Mitch McConnell 84, seven terms, the Grim Reaper of the Senate, his words, not mine, was admitted to a hospital on June 14 and has not been seen by a single human eyeball since. His office won’t say why. Police scanner audio indicates paramedics performed CPR on an unconscious person at his address that morning; a neighbor filmed someone leaving on a stretcher. That video just leaked. And yet, the official line, reissued weekly like a hostage proof-of-life, is that he's "working closely with his staff." Cool. Cool cool cool. Several Republican senators have confirmed his condition via the famously unfalsifiable medium of "we talked on the phone." Okay….???

Meanwhile, he has missed votes on housing and on the war. It is day 26. And here is the thing nobody in Washington will say out loud: the mystery of where Mitch McConnell is happens to be the least interesting thing about this story.

The most interesting thing is what he’s getting while he’s gone, and the two words that explain why you will never, ever get it.

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The bar for progressive men is underground, and this week it got a shovel.

Graham Platner suspended his Senate campaign this week after a former partner accused him of rape. And look, by the time we got here, nobody could claim they hadn’t been given a heads-up. There was already reporting about women describing troubling experiences with him. There was the tattoo situation. (The Nazi-adjacent tattoo situation, which is a phrase I’d love to stop typing about men running for office.) And through it all, a reliable chorus explaining why each new revelation was actually fine, actually context-dependent, actually not the dealbreaker it would obviously be if the guy had an R next to his name.

Watching this unfold, I kept coming back to one thought: the sheer, luxurious, spa-day levels of grace we extend to progressive men. Not because they’ve earned it as partners or colleagues, but because at some point we collectively decided that voting the right way is the same thing as having good character. It’s very much not.

One of the left’s most cherished bedtime stories is that misogyny is someone else’s problem. It lives over there, with the andrew tate podcast bros and the MAGA guys who think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Progressive men, we’re told, are built different.They’ve read the books, or at least they’ve read the goodreads reviews of the books. They went to therapy. They have pronouns in their bios. Somewhere along the way, fluency in feminist vocabulary got upgraded to immunity from patriarchal thinking. I made that upgrade myself, more than once, and I have the mistakes to show for it.

Every man alive was raised marinating in a misogynistic culture. That’s not a personal attack, that’s just the water. The question was never whether patriarchy shaped you (congratulations, it did!) but whether you’re willing to keep asking how it still does. Present tense. Ongoing. Forever!!

Which is exactly why my hackles go up around men who announce they’ve “done the work.” Done... what work? Handed in the assignment? Received the certificate? Reading bell hooks does not vaccinate you against entitlement any more than reading James Baldwin vaccinates you against racism. If anything, knowledge without humility calcifies into armor. Once a man decides he’s one of the enlightened ones, accountability stops feeling like information and starts feeling like defamation. Just watch his ten-minute selfie video blaming everyone but himself. It's a perfect illustration of a particular kind of progressive man, the one who's convinced misogyny is a political affiliation instead of socialization. He can identify sexism from across the aisle with remarkable accuracy. The only place he never seems to find it is in the front-facing camera. The brosocialist believes sexism is real, rampant, and located exclusively in the republican party. Convenient, since that's the one place he'll never have to look.

My working theory: the men most likely to disappoint you aren’t always the openly sexist ones. They’re the ones who believe they’ve transcended sexism entirely, ascended, floated up past it, achieved feminist nirvana. Because once a man decides he’s beyond critique, he is, in my experience, roughly five minutes away from proving otherwise.

And oh, have I seen this movie. Progressive men don’t reject feminism. That would be gauche. They reject feminism in a far more sophisticated and covert way: they simply decide it doesn’t apply to them. Feminism is a practice for other men, worse men, men who need it. And that self-exemption doesn’t just make them the same as the guys they sneer at. It makes them better equipped. The openly sexist man announces himself at the door. The enlightened one gets invited in. One gets your defenses. The other gets your trust and the benefit of the doubt.

Thse men absorb feminism’s vocabulary like a sponge. They become dazzlingly articulate about systems of oppression. Malle allies can spot sexism in other men from space. Feminist fluency gets these men into rooms, relationships, and bodies that would stay locked to them otherwise, and once inside they feed. They drain trust, labor, softness, years. They metabolize your best instincts, your empathy, your urge to believe men can be better, and convert it all into cover. Then the criticism lands on them, and *poof* the structural analysis evaporates. Suddenly it’s a misunderstanding. It’s a smear. It’s just a vindictive ex. Context you, silly woman, are simply missing. Watch how fast “everything is systemic” becomes “except me, I’m an individual.” Watch how the same mouth that quoted bell hooks to get in the door uses her vocabulary to call you crazy on the way out.

THESE MEN ARE NOT FEMINISTS. THEY ARE CON ARTISTS. We like to think of the right as being the ultimate purveyor of this but the left does it too. Trump performs the rich chauvinist because his audience wants a king. Brosocialists perform the evolved man because their audience, us, wants an exception. Both are drag. Both are fantasy. And both performances have the exact same subject, which is never women. It’s him. It’s always about HIM. It’s still steeped in misogny.

This is why these stories keep landing as shocking to everyone but women. Every time a progressive man implodes, there’s this collective gasp of betrayal, as if left politics come with a warranty. A man agreeing with me about healthcare tells me precisely nothing about how he handles rejection, conflict, power, intimacy, or being told no. If you exist in a female body, you have met these men: the ones desperate for you to recognize their safety without ever providing a shred of evidence for it.

And *deep breath* we have to talk about our part in this. Progressive women want so badly to have found the exception that we start doing pro bono defense work on behalf of these guys. A conservative man says something unsettling: red flag, next. A progressive man does something unsettling, and suddenly we’re out here with a magnifying glass and a corkboard, connecting strings, hunting for the innocent explanation. He’s self-aware! He’s been to therapy! He couldn’t possibly have meant it that way! Babe. WHY NOT? I am guilty of this. I am so so so guilty of this. We live in fantasy too. We want to believe in men so badly.

The bar for progressive men is so low it’s practically geological. We throw parades for them knowing things women have had to know just to survive. We hand out gold stars for baseline emotional literacy like it’s the nobel. Putting these men on pedestals doesn’t make our movement better it just makes us weaker.

Here’s the thing: the men I actually trust have never once told me they’re one of the good ones. Not once. They understand that misogyny isn’t something you opt out of by voting correctly or by calling yourself an “ally.” It’s a system you spend your whole life unlearning, knowing you will never, ever be done.

And now that I’ve been through the wringer with my own brocialists and faux feminists, that’s the only answer that has ever made me feel safe. Because the man who’s convinced he graduated from self-examination stopped doing it a long time ago. So no, I’m not lowering the bar another inch. Not out of bitterness, out of respect, for myself and honestly for men, because the real ones can clear it. Raise the bar and the good ones don’t disappear. Only the performative men do. And that’s why I actually believe this Graham Platner fiasco is a good thing. We don't win by lowering the bar. We win by believing it can be met. High standards for men aren't cynicism about them. They're the last remaining form of optimism.

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If you want to hear from a man who would never call himself an ally but quietly does the work anyway, this week's episode of Boy Problems features the inimitable Matthew Broussard. We talk dating, masculinity, comedy, relationships, and all the ridiculous ways men and women misunderstand each other. It's thoughtful, it's hilarious, and it's one of my favorite conversations we've had!!

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Every four years, the world transforms into a sports bar.

Every normal bar is taken over. Every office TV finds a higher purpose. Every man with a calendar invite suddenly discovers the importance of flexible work culture. Meetings get rescheduled because there’s a match on. TVs are suddenly on at work. Where were these TVs? Who was hiding them? Productivity becomes optional because apparently this is a cultural event, and I tolerate it because who am I to stand in the way of culture!!? And honestly, fine. I get it. Billions of viewers, national pride, grown men weeping into flags. It’s really lovely stuff.

But here's my question. If I suggested we all gather around that same conference room TV to watch Love Island, I'd be escorted out by HR. If I walked into a bar and asked them to put on the recoupling ceremony, people would look at me like I'd lost my mind.

Whenever you question the absolute ubiquity of men’s favorite pastimes being completely and unreasonably tolerated by society, someone always says, “Well, one’s a sport.” And before anyone gets too smug about that, that’s exactly the point.

“Sport” is not some neutral category handed down from the heavens with objective cultural value attached. It’s a label we collectively decided makes certain entertainment serious. And we decide which entertainment counts as culturally important based largely on who enjoys it. And it’s really funny how that works. Funny how the stuff men love gets stadiums, billion dollar broadcast deals, and office viewing parties, and the stuff women love gets eye-rolls. Men’s interests become events. Women’s interests become guilty pleasures.

Think about the language for a second. Nobody calls fantasy football a guilty pleasure, even though it's literally grown adults doing unpaid homework on the hamstrings of men they've never met.A man can spend an entire sunday watching other men chase a ball around some grass, and make how they played his whole personality the next day at work and people will listen and it’s appropaite. Being a fan is respectable.

Meanwhile, if you watch Love Island, you’re legally required to open with a disclaimer. “It’s trash, I know.” “It’s my turn-my-brain-off show.” “Don’t judge me.” We have trained an entire gender to apologize for their own hobbies as a condition of admitting to them. Women pre-shame themselves before anyone else gets the chance, because we learned early that the things we love are silly by default and the things men love are important by default.

Here’s a simple experiment. Nobody questions a guy having a second screen in the middle of a workday to watch a match. It’s normal. It’s charming, even. He’s passionate. He cares. What a guy!

Now imagine blocking your calendar for Casa Amor. Imagine a manager rolling a TV into the kitchen and announcing, “Big night tonight, folks. There’s a new bombshell in the villa.” You would not survive it. The looks. The little smirks. The “oh, you watch that?” delivered by a man wearing a replica jersey of a team he has never geographically been near.

It’s the same two hours. It’s the same emotional investment. It’s the same deeply parasocial thing. The same pleasure of caring, with complete sincerity, about the fate of strangers whose lives have no bearing on your own. Litteraly someone please explain to me the difference!!

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Somehow we’ve built an entire cultural hierarchy around which forms of escapism are respectable and which require a disclaimer. We’re remarkably good at distinguishing between something we call “culture” and something we call “brain rot” when the only meaningful difference is who we’ve decided is allowed to take their entertainment seriously. We've built an entire cultural hierarchy where men's entertainment becomes culture and women's entertainment becomes evidence of societal decline.

The joke isn't that Love Island deserves the same prestige as the World Cup. The joke is how easily we accept one kind of obsession as legitimate and dismiss the other as embarrassing, despite both involving millions of people becoming deeply invested in strangers performing extraordinarily difficult skills under immense pressure. We've just decided that being exceptional with a ball is more culturally valuable than being exceptional at navigating other human beings.

Because let’s actually line them up. A group of extremely fit twenty-somethings, selected through a brutal audition process, live together in close quarters under constant surveillance. There’s alliances. there’s fighting, injuries, there is crying, also lots of shouting. Someone makes one catastrophic decision in a moment of passion that the public will discuss for years. Careers are made and destroyed dpending on what happens on national television.

I have just described both shows.

One group is fighting for a trophy. The other is fighting over love. Why the fuck is the second one treated with less respect and importance!?

The only meaningful difference is that one competition rewards the ability to put a ball exactly where you want it to go, and the other rewards the ability to navigate one of the messiest, most psychologically demanding things human beings ever attempt: relationships. Somehow we’ve decided the first is evidence of discipline and mastery, while the second is frivolous entertainment.

As if emotional intelligence, charisma, social strategy, persuasion, resilience, and reading other people aren’t skills. We’ve just chosen to treat one kind of expertise as culturally significant and the other as embarrassing.

Tell me a man screaming at a referee through his television is fundamentally more dignified than a woman gasping at a recoupling because the man she’s been sharing a bed with walked back in holding hands with someone else. If you think women are too emotional, ask a man how he feels about a referee. Men will say reality TV is brain rot and then develop a parasocial relationship with a left back.

I don’t buy it. They’re both people becoming emotionally invested in strangers whose decisions have absolutely no bearing on their own lives. We’ve simply decided one form of investment deserves respect and the other deserves embarrassment.

He’s watching strangers play a game. I’m watching strangers play a game. His has offside rules. Mine has a firepit. We are not different!!

To be clear, I’m not coming for the World Cup. Keep the TVs, keep the sweepstakes, keep the suspiciously long lunches. Office football fever is genuinely one of the more fun things that happens at work, and solidarity with anyone dodging deadlines to watch television. That’s truly the dream.

I just want us to notice the double standard. Notice which passions get institutional support and which get eye-rolls. Notice who gets to be “a fan” and who has to be “embarrassed but honest.” Because the difference between a cultural event and a guilty pleasure was never about the content. It’s about who’s watching.

And of course, to be clear, men watch Love Island too!! And we love that about them. And nearly half the people watching the World Cup are women. The point is not that these interests are biologically assigned. The point is that once an interest is coded as feminine, even loosely, it becomes easier to trivialize, mock, or treat as something people should be slightly embarrassed to enjoy.

Anyway, if the World Cup final and a recoupling fall on the same day, I'll be watching both. The only real difference is that one is considered having interests and the other is considered having a problem.

Need a little permission to be completely unserious this Fourth of July weekend? Our latest episode of Boy Problems with Zach Noe Towers has you covered. Just do yourself a favor and don’t listen while operating heavy machinery or taking a sip of your drink because you will be laughing the whole way through!!!!!

First, a huge announcement and honestly a bit of a pinch-me moment for us: Marc Maron is coming on Boy Problems, and we’re doing it live!!

Marc has spent decades saying the things most comedians won’t, about relationships, masculinity, grief, addiction, and getting older. More recently, he’s become one of the loudest critics of the MAGA-fication of comedy and the rise of bro podcasts that mistake sucking up to powerful people for fearless conversation. As WTF comes to an end after sixteen years, we’re excited to ask him about all of it.

We’ll also be joined by the endlessly fascinating David Farrier, so this has all the makings of a truly unhinged night.

We’ll be at Elysian Theater at 7 p.m. next wednesday Canada Day, no less!!!! So if you’re having mixed feelings about the Fourth of July, consider celebrating Canada and emotionally vulnerable men instead. Grab your tickets here.

Ok, now to the main event: Jackass.

If you’ve read For the Love of Men, you already know I have an embarrassingly serious academic obsession with it. I genuinely think it’s one of the most interesting studies of masculinity ever put on film. Underneath all the shopping carts, tased testicles, bull attacks, and exploding port-a-potties is a surprisingly tender story about masculinity’s strangest bargain: put your body on the line and you might finally be worthy of love. The franchise isn’t just about men getting hurt. It’s about how masculinity rewards risk, how pain becomes proof, and how suffering earns men admiration, belonging, and affection from other men.

What’s fascinated me even more is how the guys themselves have evolved alongside masculinity. Steve-O is sober and talks openly about recovery. Johnny Knoxville has become reflective about aging, therapy, and what all that punishment was actually for. The franchise has aged from “watch these idiots hurt themselves” into something closer to “watch these men figure themselves out.”

But Jackass Forever introduced a new obsession for me, and her name is Rachel Wolfson.

Rachel is the only woman in the main cast, and suddenly the entire premise of Jackass looks different. Because if Jackass is about men voluntarily seeking pain, women have a completely different relationship to it. Women’s pain is rarely elective. It’s menstrual, reproductive, medical, and routinely minimized. Men sign up for Tough Mudders, ultramarathons, cold plunges, and getting tased by their friends. Women get handed pain whether they wanted it or not. As Rachel and I discussed when she came on Boy Problems, while I was ironically having period cramps so bad we had to stop filming multiple times, women learn about pain while we’re still girls.

Women don’t meet pain in adulthood. We meet it in middle school, while boys are still playing video games. Men pay hundreds of dollars for obstacle courses to experience the kind of resilience women were forced to develop at fourteen for free. The difference isn’t that men experience more pain. It’s that men often choose their pain, while women are expected to quietly accommodate theirs.

Our entire world revolves around men’s comfort and the minimization of their pain. Female pain on the other hand, is routinely normalized. Female-specific diseases receive less funding than conditions that primarily affect men. More research exists on male pattern baldness than on endometriosis, a disease so painful it sends millions of women to the hospital. A man losing his hair outranks a woman losing consciousness from pain. Or in some cases, her own life. Make it make sense.

Abortion laws tell you everything about how much pain we expect women to endure. Especially relevant given that it’s been four years since a group of men in robes decided they knew better than every woman alive. Childbirth is one of the most dangerous things a woman can survive, yet the people making these decisions, men who will never become pregnant, have decided that women can be forced to give birth even if they don't want to or can't afford to. Women are being forced to carry pregnancies in states where abortion is illegal, yet the diseases that only affect them remain chronically underfunded and under-researched. Society is willing to mandate childbirth, but not invest in the health of the people expected to give birth. That contradiction should outrage all of us.

So maybe that’s why men keep inventing new ways to suffer. Research shows men who seek help for pain or mental health are often seen as less masculine, by both men and women. So instead they seek out pain they can control. Ultramarathons. Cold plunges. Tough Mudders. MMA. Entire industries have sprung up around proving men can take it. Which makes me wonder if what’s driving all of this isn’t just masculinity, but pain envy. Not because men wish they had periods or wanted to give birth, but because there’s something undeniably powerful about enduring pain., something undeniably powerful about being a woman that perhaps men wish they could acquire. Women develop resilience by virtue of being alive. Men have to go looking for it. So maybe Jackass isn’t just a performance of masculinity, maybe it’s an attempt to earn the kind of toughness women have been expected to possess all along.

And if you don’t agree, come argue about it with us on Canada Day :)

And if you can’t join us in person, you’ll be able to watch the episode by subscribing to the pod!

xo Liz

Okay, so I’ve been watching the World Cup like everyone else, which mostly means I’ve become a fake expert on 48 countries I maybe couldn’t have found on a map a month ago. I’m rooting for Côte d’Ivoire against Germany because some choices make themselves. And I’m basically spending every match day praying France doesn’t win. Sorry!! I don’t make the rules. It’s been a great time. The World Cup is just Love Island for men and honestly, I finally get it.

And then somewhere in the middle of all that, half paying attention, half doomscrolling, a thought just landed on me: every single one of these countries gives new moms some kind of leave after they have a baby. I know Iraq does. Uzbekistan too. Literally all 48 teams come from countries that figured this out. Except the one hosting the whole thing. Us.

For a country that loves calling itself the greatest in the world, we spend a shocking amount of time coming in last. We built the stadiums. We're charging $19 for a Bud Light. We can fly 23 grown men across the country, put them up in luxury hotels, and spend billions hosting the biggest sporting event on Earth. But the moment a woman gives birth, America turns into a broke boyfriend who forgot his wallet. Suddenly there's just no money, no plan, and no idea how any of this could possibly work. America’s social safety net is basically just a shrug emoji.

America worships motherhood and undervalues mothers. We love talking about moms as heroes, saints, and the backbone of society. We hand out flowers on Mother’s Day, tell women that having children is the most important job in the world, and build entire political movements around protecting families.But when it comes to giving actual mothers time to recover from childbirth, a process that can involve major surgery, life-threatening complications, and months of physical recovery, bond with their babies, and learn how to care for a newborn, suddenly we’re told that’s asking too much. For a country that claims to revere motherhood, we’re remarkably unwilling to support the people doing it. The gap between how much we celebrate mothers and how little we invest in them is so wide that even every other country in this World Cup can see it. Meanwhile the actual list of countries with no paid maternity leave is basically the US plus a handful of small island nations that never even qualified. That's the club we're in. Portugal gives moms six weeks, minimum. Bulgaria gives them over a year at 90% pay, which honestly made me open a new tab to see how hard it’d be to become Bulgarian. Countries you wouldn’t necessarily think of as progressive are just... doing this. It’s not some wild ask. We’re the outlier here.

And look, technically we have the FMLA, which sounds official but is really just 12 weeks off, unpaid, and only if your job is big enough and you've been there long enough, so almost half of workers don't even qualify. And besides, unpaid leave isn't leave, it's just permission to be broke for twelve weeks. The FMLA doesn't give you time off. It gives you the legal right to not get fired while you go bankrupt. So yeah I guess technically half of us are “allowed” to take three months off to recover from childbirth, in the same way we are “allowed” to buy a yacht.

And while America has a remarkable disdain for mothers, it’s not like everyone else is having a great time either. We’re also the only World Cup nation without universal healthcare. Every other country in this tournament has decided that access to a doctor shouldn’t depend on your employment status, your income, or your ability to decipher a health insurance portal. The United States remains committed to the radical idea that seeing a doctor should be complicated.

Anyway. Keep watching the games, they're genuinely great. I'm not trying to ruin anyone's summer. I just can't get over the fact that the country hosting the tournament is the only one that doesn't guarantee paid leave to the women who gave birth to the players we're all cheering for.

If you need something to put a pep in your step, watch our latest episode of Boy Problems! We talk about why eating disorders are the ultimate glow-down and how to make sense of all the red carpet photos of women whose visible ribs are being celebrated instead of questioned. And if you would like a substack about this topic, please sound off in the comments!!

This weekend, taxpayer money funded a UFC fight on the White House lawn, and the single cultural artifact that event produced was Lindsey Graham providing overwhelming evidence for the gay allegations.

It also produced some guy you’ve never heard of, making a joke about Michelle Obama being a man. It seems insignificant. By the end, you'll understand why it's not.

American citizens paid for that. Ten to twelve million dollars to be exact, just for the security, though the UFC covered staging costs in exchange for what is essentially the most expensive and prestigious ad placement in the history of combat sports. This walking, talking Emoluments Clause violation of an event, where a private corporation rented the most famous lawn in America while the public picked up the tab, could not even manage to be interesting. It just produced a crowd of adults at a combat sports event laughing at a gender conspiracy theory about a woman who has not thought about any of them for a single second since 2016.

Michelle Obama left the White House before TikTok existed. Before ChatGPT. Before we knew COVID would ruin our lives. Before "doomscrolling" entered the dictionary. Yet there are men who still wake up every morning, open social media, and decide today, I need to talk about Michelle Obama. Men who, years after she last held any office or title, remain consumed by the question of whether she is real, whether she is what she appears to be, whether she is, in some fundamental sense, too much.

The humiliation isn’t that they think she’s a man. The humiliation is that they can’t stop thinking about her.

There is something particularly telling about which women draw this kind of obsessive, conspiratorial attention. It is almost never directed at women who move through the world quietly. It is aimed, with almost surgical precision, at women who command rooms. And when those women are Black, the obsession curdles into something uglier. It becomes a refusal to accept that a Black woman could be this visible, this powerful, this undeniable, without some kind of trick being involved. The crazy thing is that she simply is. She earned it, built it, and belongs there, and that idea is too destabilizing to accept.

This is not just racism. This is not just misogyny. It is a kind of psychic submission dressed up as mockery. To be endlessly preoccupied with a woman you claim to find irrelevant is not dominance, it’s fixation. And fixation is not power. Fixation is actually very much the opposite. The strangest part of this conspiracy theory is that it tells us almost nothing about Michelle Obama and everything about the men who spread it. Nobody spends this much time trying to explain away someone who doesn't matter to them. For over a decade, they've been unable to stop talking about her. Her intelligence, her popularity, her confidence, her influence. They insist they're exposing her, but what they're really exposing is the depth of their obssession with her. It's hard not to wonder whether what they're feeling is closer to envy than contempt.

They hate her because they're not her. Michelle Obama represents, almost perfectly, the kind of person Americans are taught to admire: disciplined, intelligent, hardworking, devoted to family, physically active, and comfortable exercising authority. These are not radical qualities. They are the qualities we put on motivational posters, deliver commencement speeches about, and claim to reward. Yet for men whose identity depends on believing those traits belong more naturally to men, and who may not embody them nearly as convincingly themselves, a woman who does becomes difficult to process. Admiring her would require acknowledging her. It's easier to convince themselves she's a fraud. The conspiracy theory isn't really an attempt to explain Michelle Obama. It's an attempt to explain away their discomfort with her.

A man who is genuinely secure in his own identity does not need Michelle Obama to be smaller. He does not need her to be weaker, quieter, or somehow biologically explained away. He can simply... not think about her. He can let her exist. The men who cannot do that, those who return to her again and again, who have made her a permanent character in their political mythology years after she left the White House, are not demonstrating their dominance. They are revealing the extent of their fixation. After all this time, Michelle Obama is still taking up space in their heads while they occupy none in hers.

The rally on the White House lawn will be forgotten. That entetainer’s name will fade. The crowd’s laughter will dissolve into the noise of a thousand other moments, but Michelle Obama will remain. Not because she is trying to, not because she is fighting back or issuing statements or demanding recognition. But because she simply is. Tall, accomplished, composed, entirely herself, and that is more than these men can bear. Their obsession is not a sign of their power over her. It is a confession of her power over them.

Everyone says they’re concerned about Ariana Grande.

I believe them. Looking at recent photos from her tour, it’s hard not to have a reaction. Ariana Grande doesn’t look merely thin. Her collarbones protrude sharply. Her ribs are visible. Her frame appears dramatically diminished. Whether or not any of us can know what is happening behind the scenes, the images evoke associations with illness and malnourishment, which helps explain why they’ve generated such a visceral response.

But I don’t think concern fully explains what’s happening.

If this were simply concern, the conversation would be much smaller. Concern doesn’t usually generate thousands of comments, endless tiktoks, think pieces, reddit threads, and group chats. It doesn’t explain why so many women seem emotionally activated by these images, why they keep returning to them, or why the discourse feels charged with something that goes beyond empathy for a celebrity.

When I listen to women talk about Ariana Grande, what I hear underneath the concern is something more complicated. I hear fear. Not necessarily fear for her, but fear for themselves.

Part of that fear is cultural. We are living through a moment that has made extreme thinness aspirational again. Ozempic has changed the geometry of celebrity bodies in ways that feel sudden. It's a lot to absorb. The speed at which women are shrinking feels almost hallucinatory. As though an entire beauty standard has been accelerated in real time. Every week another female celebrity walks a red carpet with a new bone protruding. The cumulative effect is hard to overstate.

We call this a trend, but I think for many women it feels more like a trigger. Ariana Grande is not a neutral figure in this conversation, but neither is the audience watching her. What we often forget is that there is no truly neutral place for women in a patriarchal culture. Some women are recovering from eating disorders. Some are actively living with them. Most carry traces of the same logic without ever receiving a diagnosis. For many women, it doesn't feel like a shift in aesthetics. It feels like the reactivation of a set of thoughts they have spent years trying to silence. Women and eating disorders often exist in a kind of permanent negotiation, not a war you win once and for all, but a relationship you manage, a distance you maintain, always aware of exactly how many steps separate you from the edge you once stood on.

For most women, the question is not whether they’ve had an eating disorder. It’s when. Women and eating disorders exist in a kind of permanent negotiation. It’s not a war you win, but a relationship you manage, a distance you maintain, always aware of exactly how many steps you are from the edge you used to stand on.

Part of the reason the discourse around women's bodies feels so off-kilter is that we fundamentally misunderstand how eating disorders work. We tend to think about anorexia like cancer: you have it, you treat it, and hopefully one day it's gone. But for most women, eating disorders function much more like addiction. The impulses don't necessarily disappear. The logic remains available to you. The voice remains recognizable. Recovery is less about erasing those thoughts than about repeatedly choosing not to follow them, which means that even years of healing can coexist with emotional frailty.

When people dismiss reactions to the return of extreme thinness as overblown, they often fail to understand that for many women, these images are not really about Ariana Grande at all. They are looking at her, but they're remembering themselves. They're remembering the version of themselves that soent hundreds if not thousands of hours trying to become smaller.

That's why triggers can be so frightening. A recovering alcoholic doesn't walk into a bar and see what everyone else sees. They see a former life. I think that's true for many women looking at celebrity bodies right now. They aren't just seeing Ariana Grande. They're remembering calorie counts, skipped meals, the strange euphoria of hunger, the exhausting mental math of trying to take up less space. Women are not really seeing Ariana Grande. They’re seeing who they used to be, and who they were afraid they might become again. Many of us are seeing a future we thought we had escaped. Nothing exposes the fragility of body acceptance quite like realizing a single photograph can undo years of work.

But that’s complicated so it’s easier for us to call that concern. Concern sounds generous. Concern sounds compassionate. It feels far more noble than admitting that what you’re experiencing is panic, grief, or the sudden realization that your recovery might not be as far behind you as you thought.

What makes Ariana such a powerful figure in this conversation is that she represents someone who should theoretically be free from all of this. She is beautiful, wealthy, successful, beloved, and one of the most recognizable women on the planet. If anyone should have escaped the trap of beauty culture, surely it would be someone like her.

I think that’s part of what women are reacting to. Ariana Grande shatters the comforting fantasy that there are women who have escaped. The fantasy that enough money, enough success, enough self-awareness, enough therapy, or enough feminism can finally free you from the impossible demands placed on women’s bodies. Eating disorders do not care about your tax bracket. Body obsession does not care how famous you are. The impossible task of being a woman in public transcends class because the demand is the same at every level: take up less space, but don’t disappear; be beautiful, but don’t look like you’re trying; remain desirable, but make it effortless.

What makes this conversation so painful is that it forces women to confront a possibility many of us would rather not think about: understanding beauty standards is not the same thing as transcending them. You can know exactly how the machine works and still find yourself caught inside it. You can spend years unpacking diet culture, years in therapy, years building a healthier relationship with your body, and still feel something shift when the culture starts rewarding thinness again.

Maybe that’s why our reaction to Ariana Grande feels so emotionally charged. Not because she’s vulnerable, but because she appears vulnerable in ways we hoped she wouldn’t be. We wanted to believe there were women who had made it out. Women who had reached the other side of all this.

I truly think that women don’t want to be thin nearly as much as they want to be free from wanting to be thin. They don’t want to be beautiful nearly as much as they want to be free from having to think about whether they are beautiful. The fantasy was never thinness. It was freedom. Looking at Ariana Grande forces women to confront the possibility that freedom is not something a body can earn, and that there may be no final destination where these pressures disappear completely. There is only the ongoing work of resisting them, and the uncomfortable realization that even after all these years, we may be more vulnerable to them than we thought.

If this essay left you wanting to lie on the floor for a little while, may I recommend the latest episode of Boy Problems. We eat Cinnabons, talk about Taco Bell, and spend an hour discussing things that are significantly lower stakes than women's collective body image. Consider it a palate cleanser. A little dose of hopecore for anyone who needs a break from thinking about patriarchy, beauty standards, or the state of the world.

Modern therapy culture has made many women exceptionally skilled at understanding the men who hurt them. That’s what kept running through my mind watching the latest season of Couples Therapy.

I used to love this show, but lately it’s started to feel almost unethical to watch. What once felt like an intimate look at human behavior now feels like watching people use the language of therapy to rationalize abuse. Couples Therapy has become a fascinating show about people who should not be in couples therapy at all.

There’s a well-established clinical consensus that couples therapy is contraindicated in abusive relationships, meaning the format itself can make things worse. Couples therapy assumes both people enter the room with a relatively equal level of power, safety, and freedom to speak honestly. But when one partner is manipulative, deceptive, financially exploitative, or emotionally coercive, the therapy room does not level the playing field. It often just gives the harmful partner a more sophisticated vocabulary, a more convincing performance, and a new arena in which to exercise power.

That is what makes this season so unsettling. Not because the relationships are messy. Messy is the entire premise of the show. What feels different this season is that several of these couples do not seem stuck in communication breakdowns or attachment wounds. They seem trapped in dynamics where one person is actively harming the other, while therapy slowly reorganizes itself around understanding the person doing the harm. At several points this season I stopped feeling like I was watching documentary filmmaking and started feeling like I was watching women negotiate with people who had already demonstrated they absolutely could not be trusted.

Take Clinton and Shay. Clinton recently received an autism diagnosis, which is genuinely significant. Late diagnoses can completely reframe a person’s understanding of themselves and their relationships. None of that is fake, and none of it should be mocked. But over the course of the season, the diagnosis starts functioning less like context and more like immunity. Clinton uses it as a reason for Every concern Shay raises gets rerouted through Clinton’s neurodivergence. Every request for accountability comes back to her as insufficient patience, insufficient empathy, insufficient understanding.It feels infuriating to watch, like the camera crew should have been legally obligated to step in.

Shay sat across from a man who stole from her, cheated on her, and used her uber account like a personal car service for his mistresses, and asked herself if she was being too hard on him. The way women are conditioned to absorb, explain, and forgive is so normalized we put it on TV and call it a love story. If you could bottle whatever keeps straight women in relationships that are clearly not working you could power a small city. Straight women are not okay and they are also incredible. Their capacity to find the redeemable thing in a man who has given you nothing but reasons to leave should honestly be in a museum. But Couples Therapy is not reality tv anymore, it’s a longitudinal study on why women stay when they absolutely should not.

And to be abundantly clear, autism is a neurological difference. Stealing from your girlfriend to buy yourself a flatscreen is a choice. That is not being neurodivergent, that’s just being a dick. And besides, autistic people are actually more likely to be victims of financial exploitation in relationships, not perpetrators of it. I just really needed to say that!!

Then there is Sienna and Chris, whose sessions are some of the bleakest television I have watched in years. Chris cheated. He hired professional cuddlers. The explanation for all of it traces back to his childhood, his unmet needs, his emotionally unavailable mother, the affection he did not receive as a child and has spent adulthood trying to recover from women who are not his wife. In other words, it’s a woman’s fault and another woman’s responsability to fix his problems.

Childhood trauma is real, but the structure of the sessions becomes painfully familiar to anyone who has ever dated someone who is highly skilled at centering their own pain. Every time the conversation edges toward Sienna’s betrayal, her humiliation, her grief, the emotional gravity shifts back toward Chris. Back to his sadness. Back to his wounds. Back to the psychological architecture that explains why he hurt her. And she comforts him through it. Literally. She holds him in her lap while he cries about his own behavior that is actively harming HER. She strokes his hair like a child. Watching it feels less like watching a couple work through conflict and more like watching a woman slowly lose herself inside someone else’s emotional needs.

Straight women are taught to stay forever. To communicate more, understand more, forgive more, be more patient, be less emotional, give him another chance. Our nurturing is not just expected, it’s extracted, often by the men we’re in relationships with. But maybe this is the work feminism still has left to do. Not just getting better at identifying harmful men, but getting more honest about women’s own reluctance to leave them. We know how to name manipulation now. We know how to talk about narcissism and gaslighting and emotional abuse. But too often the conversation ends there, as if awareness alone is liberation.

At some point, feminism has to mean more than teaching women how to eloquently explain their own suffering. It has to ask what we do with that knowledge. I don’t think it’s victim blaming to say women have agency, even inside painful or unhealthy relationships. In fact, I think it’s more patronizing to pretend they don’t. We do women a disservice when we only validate their analysis of harmful behavior but never encourage them to act on it, leave, demand better, or choose differently for themselves. I want better for women. I want better for myself. And I think real empowerment has to include the belief that we are capable of changing our lives, not just becoming more articulate about why they hurt. So yes, women are strong. But my hope for us is that we build lives where we don’t have to be all the time.

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And if you need some uplifting programming to chase this season of couples therapy., listen to our latest boy problems with Brandon Kyle Goodman where we talk about how everyone is gay!! And please keep sending me your boy problems and I might answer them on the show!

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Ok real talk, I report on the apocalypse for a living so my immune system is basically working overtime. I know what works and what doesn’t because I have tried it all. When I feel like I’m about to get sick (you know the feeling!!) I rely on my favorite new favorite immunity staple, the Pique Brazilian Propolis Spray. I spray on my tonsils and for some reason, it works, like genuinely works. And then to top if off, I take their Daily Immune Vitamin C and their matcha and for some reason it always gets me out of any funk. I’m not a doctor, I’m just a girl sitting in front of her laptop, trying not to get sick while covering the end of democracy!!! Hope this helps :)

Good news! Jeff Bezos has looked into poverty and the problem is actually you.

Jeff Bezos, a man sitting on $270 billion who bought a yacht so large it required a support yacht, who had a historic bridge in the Netherlands temporarily dismantled so his boat could pass through, who then named that boat Koru which means “new beginnings” because nothing says new beginnings like destroying public infrastructure for your hobby, sat down for a softball interview with CNBC yesterday to explain why taxing Jeff Bezos would not help you. He did this from Florida. He did this with confidence, and with a weird new face that is puffy from injections you can’t afford. He did this while being worth $270 billion. With a spaceship that he owns in the background of the shot!! His commitment to being a supervillain is simply unmatched!!

Let's go through it. The first banger was the math. Specifically Jeff Bezos's new and exciting relationship with math, in which redistributing resources, something humans have done for literally the entire duration of human existence, from the first cave to the first civilization to every society that has ever functioned, simply doesn't work. He has done the research. The research was done in Florida. The conclusion is that the cavemen had it wrong and Jeff Bezos has it right.

OKAY INTERESTING NEW DEVELOPMENT.

“You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you,” he said. The confidence. The audacity. The puffy face. Unreal!!!

Jeff Bezos used math to prove that Jeff Bezos paying more taxes wouldn't help. Adorable. And honestly? I respect the commitment to inventing your own reality. I support a man so committed to his own delusions that he will sit in front of a spaceship he personally owns and explain to the people who built it with their labor why their lives have nothing to do with his money.

But honestly I am less concerned with Jeff Bezos’ new take on math, and more concerned with his mental stability. Because we have to start saying it like it is. There is something genuinely, clinically wrong with a man who sits on piles of money while people die from lack of access to food and medicine and housing and thinks the problem is government spending. It’s literally the year of the cabbage. That is a real thing that is happening. People cannot afford vegetables and are organizing their entire diets around cabbage because it is the last affordable produce standing. And Jeff Bezos is on TV explaining why his infinite amount of money is not the problem. I don't think Jeff Bezos needed a new face, I think he needs a CT scan.

His delusions is are not an economic position he’s defending, it’s a pathology we’re all witnessing. Hoarding resources so far beyond anything you could ever use while other people die from not having enough is not a personality quirk. It is a mental disorder. If he was accumulating lawn chairs, instead of dollars bills, he would be on a show called Hoarders, not CNBC.This is hoarding behavior on a scale so vast we invented a word for the people who do it. We call them billionaires. We should probably call them something else.

Now here is the part of the interview that should make your head actually leave your body. Bezos called billionaire vilification "a distraction" and said politicians are using an "age-old technique of picking a villain and pointing fingers." This man. Who spent the entire interview pointing fingers at the government, at Mayor Mamdani, at public spending inefficiency, at the nurse in Queens' tax burden, at unions, at anyone and anything that wasn't Jeff Bezos. That man would like you to know that pointing fingers is unproductive and solves nothing. GOT IT.

And then, to really cement the mentally unwell allegations, he said Trump is 'a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than in his first term.' I want you to sit with that sentence. This is the same Trump who threatened to inoculate an entire civilization. The same guy who celebrated the recent and violent death of a beloved national treasure. The same guy who dismantled the postal service that Amazon's entire business model depends on. The same Trump who has overseen an economy that has made Jeff Bezos significantly richer while making the nurse in Queens significantly poorer.

Jeff Bezos doesn’t need another yacht, he needs to be medicated.

Here's the truth: Jeff Bezos isn't a visionary or a genius. He's not even a self made man. He is a man who started with more than most people will ever see, built his empire on the backs of people who were documented urinating in bottles because bathroom breaks hurt their productivity metrics, extracted more than any single human being should ever be allowed to extract from a society, and is now sitting in Florida in front of a spaceship he used to send Katy Perry to space for reasons that remain unclear to everyone including probably Katy Perry, explaining to the people he extracted it from why the extraction is not the problem.

Bold promise from a man whose face is currently worth more in injections than the teacher in Queens makes in a year.

New York City Mayor Mamdani has the best response in the smallest amount of words. Only eight of them and they were perfect. 'I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ.' He is one of the most popular politicians in America right now. Jeff Bezos is not. And that my friends, is the only math that matters.

If you need a little boost of hope today, listen to our latest boy problems where I talk about how to whimsymaxx your disapointment!! And please keep sending me your boy problems and I might answer them on the show!! And if you need some competency porn right now, go listen to our interview with Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s wife, Catherine Hansen, where she talks about hope and how to survive having the longest long distance relationship in the cosmos!

x Liz

I’m not doing well. And I don’t think you are either.

Here is a partial list of things that have happened like very recently. The Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965 after centuries of terror and decades of organizing and the literal deaths of people who believed Black Americans deserved to participate in their own democracy, has been so thoroughly gutted that voting rights lawyers are essentially doing triage. A Netflix roast aired lynching jokes and George Floyd jokes to a laughing audience on one of the most watched platforms on earth. The comedian who made those jokes is the same man who six months ago stood at a Trump rally and called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, and was then invited back, given a bigger room, a larger audience, and a Netflix budget. Kevin Hart, one of the most successful Black comedians alive, doubled over laughing. The audience laughed too. And somewhere a twelve year old girl named Gianna watched people make jokes about how her father died and went to school the next day to be bullied about it.

And the president is a million years old and falling asleep in meetings about a war he can’t even explain, while the people around him are pretending none of it is happening because they’re pedophile protectors or alcoholics, or both. The jesters are on stage making lynching jokes, and the resources are being hoarded by billionaires with large foreheads who brag about not self-reflecting, and the walls are closing in, and everyone on television is talking about a new virus like might be the next pandemic, you know the thing that kinda got in this mess in the first place???

It is not normal.You are not crazy!!! My SSRI vape line is a joke but a few days ago, I came up with it because I genuinely could have used it. What you have been feeling has a name. Two of them actually. And I promise you… knowing what they are is going to make you feel a lot more powerful than you do right now.

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There is a feeling I’ve been carrying, and I know a lot of us have been carrying, without a name for it. It’s this deep well of sadness and paralyzing grief that takes over when you watch someone do something genuinely cruel, mock a disabled person, use a slur on a livestream, celebrate wiping out an entire civilization, and instead of being met with consequence, they are met with an audience. A big one.

It’s especially foreign to Millennials, who grew up in a specific historical moment where kindness was king. People ascended to power because they wanted to do good and they got rewarded for it. Barack Obama ran on hope and won twice. Facebook told us it just wanted to connect people and we believed it, because believing it made sense then. Kindness was currency. You watched Friends and the characters were trying, however imperfectly, to be good to each other. You grew up with Michelle Obama telling you that when they go low, you go high, and it felt true, not naive. The cultural villains, the bullies, the mean girls, the ones who made others feel small, were the ones who lost in the end. That was the story we were told, and for a while, it was also the story we watched play out. Being openly cruel was embarrassing. It shut doors. People distanced themselves from it, or at least pretended to.

Somewhere along the way that flipped. And it didn’t happen all at once, which is probably why it’s hard to point to.

Now there’s this weird admiration for not caring. For being willing to say anything, do anything, cross any line, especially if that line is malice. And that shift didn’t just change what people say out loud, it changed what people respect. You can feel it even when no one says it directly. Joe Rogan, the most listened-to podcaster on earth, spent years building an audience on the premise that caring is the problem. That being asked to consider other people’s humanity, trans people, Black people, women, was an imposition rather than a baseline. The takeaway people ran with wasn’t nuance. It was just: goodness is weakness. Caring got coded as feminine and suddenly nobody wanted to do it anymore. Male podcasters feminized decency so they could opt out without guilt. Abandoning kindness wasn’t just cool, it was framed as liberation.

Once cruelty became masculine, the idea found legs. It metastasized into a whole personality type that people copied and built on. Andrew Tate constructed an empire on the premise that empathy is emasculating, that the measure of a man is his willingness to dominate. He was arrested on human trafficking charges and his following only grew. Nick Fuentes laundered outright antisemitism into content that circulated as edgy humor until it stopped being humor at all and started showing up at political rallies. Clavicular overdosed on a livestream. He has built a following on telling kids to inject testosterone and take illegal drugs, to squeeze every drop of personal gain out of being alive. Humanity as hustle. Existence as content. The endless stream of influencers who say the n-word as a bit, who tell kids their trans identity is a delusion, who treat cruelty as a personality and hate as a business model, they wake up the next morning with more followers than before. The cruelty is not accidental or a byproduct. It is the thing that makes it spread.

People talk about the backlash to so-called woke culture like it’s a political or generational phenomenon. But underneath all of that language, something simpler was happening that people don’t really want to say plainly. Being a good person started to feel kind of lame. And being a bad one started to look powerful, or at least like you were free from something everyone else was stuck in. When Elon Musk reinstated accounts of avowed white nationalists on X, when he shared antisemitic conspiracy theories to his 200 million followers and faced no meaningful consequence, when he became the most powerful unelected figure in the United States government, that was not a political story. That was a moral one. That was the moment the lesson became undeniable clear: you can be openly, documentably bad and still win.

These aren’t fringe figures yelling into nothing. I was on a panel earlier a few days ago at the POSSIBLE conference in Miami, tasked with helping execs understand the importance of reaching young men with a positive message about masculinity, and I was struck by the nonchalance of the Gen Z panelist sitting next to me. “Gen Z men don’t take Clavicular seriously,” he said. I told him that Gavin Newsom’s own son likes him. If the child of one of the most progressive men in American politics cannot escape the reach of Clavicular’s message, what hope is there for the rest of young men growing up online? The dismissviness felt uncomfortably familiar. It had the same texture as the people who told us we were overreacting about Trump. That nobody was really taking him seriously. That it wouldn’t go that far. Of course, we know how that went.

The most influential people in the world right now have one thing in common. It is not talent. It is a complete and monetized indifference to the harm they cause. Sam Altman once described the part of his brain that would make him care what people think as a “missing circuit.” He called it a gift. He now runs the most powerful AI company on earth. Marc Andreessen recently declared he has “zero introspection” and that the great men of history never bothered with self-examination either. Elon Musk jumped in to agree, posting that therapy and introspection are a recipe for misery. Between them they control the future.

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Spring is genuinely one of my favorite times of year. The light comes back, the energy shifts, and suddenly everyone wants to be outside again. After months of hibernating, we’re all reemerging blinking into the sun and it’s beautiful. But also, if I’m being honest, it’s also the exact moment my immune system starts freaking out.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: spring allergies don’t just make you sneezy and miserable, they actually weaken your immune system. Your body is so busy fighting pollen it has less bandwidth to fight everything else, which is why so many of us end up sick right as the weather gets good. It’s very cruel, truly!! I’ve been leaning on Pique’s Brazilian Propolis Spray for exactly this reason. It’s become the thing I reach for before a big day out, after a crowded event, or honestly just when I feel like my body deserves some backup. It doesn’t feel like anything intense—it just feels like a simple daily habit that helps me feel more steady.

And then there’s the matcha. I have a complicated relationship with coffee. I love it in theory and then it loves me back a little too much. It’s hard for me to stop at one, and then suddenly I’m not awake, I’m anxious. Pique’s Sun Goddess Matcha has been my gentler, kinder morning ritual.Clean, steady energy without the spike or crash, just a more even kind of focus that actually lasts. If you’ve ever wanted to be a morning person without the accompanying anxiety spiral, this is your thing.

And if you’re also in a seasonal reset moment, Pique is currently offering up to 20% off for life + free gifts for a limited time. It’s a simple way to build daily rituals that support both immune health and steady energy through spring and beyond.

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And once goodness starts to feel naive or embarrassing, once it becomes something only people without power hold onto, everything else follows. You’re not just changing internet culture. You’re lowering the baseline for how people treat each other in real life. You’re making cruelty feel normal, and then you’re building platforms that reward it, and then you’re installing the men who built those platforms into the highest offices of government.

There are trans teenagers who are living, or not living, with the consequences of that decision. There are communities dealing with antisemitism that started as jokes until it turned into hate crimes. There are boys learning early that attention comes easier when you disregard others.

Millennials remember when it wasn’t like this. When the cultural reward for cruelty wasn’t a podcast deal or a cabinet position. When being openly awful came with a social cost. When the story we told ourselves, and our kids, was that the good ones win in the end.

We were not wrong to believe that. That belief is not naive. It is, in fact, the only thing that has ever actually changed anything. And it is still available to us, if we’re brave enough to pick it back up.

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If you need a little millennial hope today, listen to our latest boy problems with Zoe Lister-Jones where we talk about the power and potential of female sexuality. And please keep sending me your boy problems and I might answer them on the show!! If you need some competency porn, go listen to our interview with Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen's wife, Catherine Hansen, where she talks about having the longest long distance relationship in the cosmos :) I miss you already!!

Kash Patel is allegedly too drunk to come to work. Pete Hegseth is out here quoting Pulp Fiction at Pentagon prayer services and, reportedly, farting through press conferences. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once pulled over on the side of the road, found a dead raccoon, and cut its balls off to study later. These are the men currently running the United States government, and somehow none of that has disqualified them from power. Trump got rid of DEI hires, and replaced them with DUI hires.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have imposter syndrome. Especially if you’re a woman, a minority or a man who has felt shame once in his life. Maybe it’s happening to you RIGHT NOW. You are sitting here rereading an email you’ve already reread four times wondering if you sound too aggressive or not assertive enough or somehow both simultaneously. You are second-guessing your tone in that slack message. You’re wondering if you’re qualified enough to ask for a raise, to speak up in a meeting, to apply for a job you are objectively qualified for. You are doing seventeen layers of mental math about how you will be perceived before you even say a single word out loud.

All of this WHILE the FBI Director, you know a man who is overseeing one of the most powerful agencies in human history, who is currently, literally AT WAR was allegedly so out of it that he could not be located behind a locked door. They had to request an actual SWAT team. You know, the stuff they use for hostage situations and active shooters. To find the FBI Director. Who was allegedly passed out somewhere inside his own residence. AGAIN, WHILE WE ARE AT WAR FOR A REASON THE PRESIDENT CANNOT EVEN PROVIDE.

Girl. LOOK AT THEM. YOU ARE SO GOOD.

At a certain point (and I would argue that point is now) that it was actually several raccoon incidents ago, you have to look at both of these realities side by side and admit that something is fundamentally, cosmically, almost impressively broken in the way we talk about confidence and competence. I mean I have reread this email four times because of one exclamation point. The FBI Director allegedly could not be woken up by his own security detail. We are not the same. Something is very off!!!

There is no parallel version of this reality for women. There is no universe where repeated misconduct gets absorbed, forgotten, and then rewarded with a promotion and a government salary. For women or marginalized people, one mistake is a permanent record, not just a speed bump that doesn’t even last a 24h news cycle. The women in the Trump admin have been just as incompetent but somehow punished more for it.

So when we talk about imposter syndrome, it’s worth asking what we’re actually diagnosing here. Because the issue is not that women and decent men are irrationally doubting themselves in rooms full of highly qualified people. The issue is that we have been conditioned to over-examine ourselves in rooms where a lot of other people are not examining themselves at all. Like, genuinely not even a little bit.

So basically if you’re still not sure if your imposter syndrome is valid, if you haven’t:

-tried to quote a movie as scripture

-needed SWAT gear to be located

-shown up to work unconscious

-sued a magazine for noticing

-shared classified information in a group chat with a journalist

-can identify the bible in a lineup

YOU ARE DOING BETTER THAN THE PEOPLE WITH THE NUCLEAR CODES.

But here is the upside. You know I’m gonna find a positive spin!! The men currently running the US government are doing more for women’s confidence than every self help book ever written, combined. Turns out the antidote to my imposter syndrome was free and it just the news. If alcoholics and pedophiles think they can run the government, you can apply for the job you think you’re not ready for.

Last week we talked about the Artemis crew, which was essentially competency porn, people who are genuinely, almost offensively good at their jobs, doing their jobs, and it was so refreshing it briefly restored faith in humanity. This week we have clowns to remind us of why that moment felt so special.

So the lesson from this particular episode of the apocalypse is simple: give yourself some slack. Your messiest, most chaotic version of yourself would not even register on the scale of mess currently operating out of the White House. Your worst professional moment and their average Tuesday are not even in the same category. You are not an imposter. You never were. You have just been measuring yourself against a standard that the people currently in charge have never once applied to themselves. Not even loosely. So go be a little messy. You’ve earned it.

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If you need something fun to listen to, go listen to the last episode of BOY PROBLEMS with sexpert Emily Morse. This episode is full of gems and secrets about how to have a better sex life. And send me your own boy problems. They can be funny, goofy, serious, unhinged, whatever you’re going through!! I might answer it on the show!