Earlier this summer, I had the pleasure of chatting with Lydia Bielen, Playboy’s Miss August 2026. A self described “flower child,” her shoot embodies the nearly psychedelic quality of late summer days, dizzy with heat. In revisiting the Miss August’s of decade’s past, it’s clear how that same vibe has been captured across time. The styles change, the feeling doesn’t. The season may be coming to an end, but here it’s forever.

— , Senior Editor

Miss August 1968: Gale Olson

Miss August 1972: Linda Summers

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Miss August 1989: Gianna Amore

Miss August 1994: Maria Checa

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Miss August 2004: Pilar Lastra

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Miss August 2018: Lorena Medina

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Playboy: Hello, Dolly.

Dolly Parton: Hi. I’ll save you the trouble of askin’: Why do I choose to look so outrageous?

Playboy: Is that the first question interviewers usually ask you?

Parton: That’s what we usually end up talkin’ about.

Playboy: Actually, that was going to be our second question. We were going to start with the Playboy cover. It’s pretty eye-catching. Was it fun?

Parton: I was afraid at first, when we talked about it. I didn’t want to be naked or something on the front of a magazine unless everybody knew it was a joke.

I mean, I wouldn’t want to be naked even then. It might not offend me, but I was afraid maybe a lot of my country fans and some of the people who love me who are of a religious nature might not understand.

People will make jokes and things, not because of my beauty but just because of that physical thing that’s built around my boobs. I didn’t know if I wanted to be put in a category of where I was flaunting something I had never flaunted before.

Then I thought, It isn’t something I should be ashamed of. Playboy‘s a real classy magazine. And I mean, who else but Dolly Parton should be on the cover of Playboy? If you wanted an outrageous person to be an outrageous magazine cover, who else? I just hope people will take it in the spirit in which I did it—you know, something cute and off-the-wall for me.

Playboy: Okay. Now, why do you choose to look so outrageous?

Parton: People have thought I’d be a lot further along in this business if I dressed more stylish and didn’t wear all this gaudy getup. Record companies have tried to change me. I just refused. If I am going to look like this, I must have had a reason.

It’s this: If I can’t make it on my talent, then I don’t want to do it. I have to look the way I choose to look, and this is what I’ve chose. It makes me different a little bit, and ain’t that what we all want to do: be a little different?

It’s fun for me. It’s like a little kid playing with her paints and colors. I like to sit and tease my hair. If there’s something new on the market in make-up, I like to try it.

You’ve got to have a gimmick. You’ve got to have something that will catch the eye and hold the attention of the public. But the funny thing is, no matter how much I try new staff, I wind up looking just the same.

Playboy: Do you think you’ll become a fashion trend-setter? Isn’t there already a Dolly Parton look?

Parton: [Laughing] Can you imagine anybody wanting to look this way for real? When people first get to know me, they say, “Why do you wear all of this?” Then, after a week of knowing me, they totally understand.

They know it’s just a bunch of baloney. But why not? Life’s boring enough, it makes you try to spice it up. I guess I just throw on a little too much spice.

Playboy: Why are there so many Dolly Parton look-alike contests?

Parton: Because they’re fun. Who would be better to impersonate than Dolly Parton? All you gotta do is get a big blonde wig, makeup, and if you’re pretty well proportioned … or you can even fake it.

The best parts of Dolly Parton look-alike contests are guys dressed up like girls. It’s so easy to do me.

Playboy: Have you ever met any of the winners?

Parton: I sure have. They were the biggest bunch of pigs I ever saw, most of them. I thought to myself, Is that how people think I look? I thought,

Oh, Lord, some of them were in worse shape than I even thought I was. I’ve only seen two that would even be classified as a human being.

Playboy: So you don’t think they’ve ever been able to imitate the real, sexy you?

Parton: Listen, I never thought of myself as being a sex symbol. It never crossed my mind that anybody might think I was sexy.

Playboy: But surely, after all the media exposure you’ve received, you have to be conscious of what people say and think about you.

Parton: I didn’t say what you all thought. I said that it never once crossed my mind, even now. I still can’t get it through my head that people think I’m supposed to be sexy or somethin’. I don’t want that responsibility. I don’t want to have to keep up an image like that.

I don’t want to have to be like a beautiful woman, like a Raquel Welch—which is no trouble, I never would anyway. I’m just sayin’ I wouldn’t want people to look at me and if I gained ten pounds, they’d say, “Oh, God, she’s ruined her looks.”

I’m made up of many things. I’m very complex. I have much more depth than just my looks, which to me are not all that hot, anyway. I’ve always looked a certain way and had an image. I like the big hairdo, the gaudy clothes.

There’s not much sexy about that. Men are not usually turned on by artificial looks and I’ve always been like that.

Playboy: If that’s true, why do you suppose there’s such a huge cosmetic industry in this country?

Parton: I’m talking about my kind—the big wigs, the total artificial look. I don’t try to dress in style or to be really classy.

I’ve got my work to do and I like to look good, but I don’t try to keep an image other than just this gimmick appearance that I have. If I was trying to really impress men or be totally sexy, then I would dress differently.

Playboy: How would you look?

Parton: I would wear low-cut things. Try to keep my weight down. Try to really work on my body. I would find a new, softer, sexier hairstyle—it would be my own hair, some way.

But why bother? I’m already married and he don’t mind how I look. He likes me gaudy or ungaudy.

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Playboy: When were you first attracted to gaudiness?

Parton: I was always fascinated with makeup. We didn’t have any when I grew up. We weren’t allowed to wear it. But we used to have this medicine, what you call Merthiolate, that’s what I would put on my lips as a little kid. I’d paint my lips and there was nothin’ Daddy could do. He couldn’t rub it off.

He would say, “Get that lipstick off you!” And I’d say, “It won’t come off, it’s my natural coloring, Daddy.” Then he’d say, “Bull.” When we wanted eyebrows, we’d get burned matches and make little eyebrows.

When I was a sophomore in high school, the teased hair came into style and I started doing that, and ever since, I’ve clone it. And I wore my skirts so tight I could hardly wiggle in them. I liked tight sweaters. I just like tight clothes, I always did.

I just like to feel things next to me, I guess. Even before I had a figure, I liked my clothes snug and tight. People would always kid me in school about my little butt and my little blue jeans or whatever. Momma, she always understood stuff like that.

She’d say, “Don’t get them so tight you can’t move in them, where they cut your wind off.” But she’d seam them up and if they weren’t quite tight enough, I’d say, “Won’t you fix them a little right in here?” And she would. See, she was a daughter of a preacher and when she was a child, they wouldn’t let her wear any make-up.

They all had long hair then and she wanted her hair cut. The very day that her and Daddy got married, she cut her hair off and she kept it short ever since. She said, “I swore then that when I had kids, I would not make ’em do things that they were uneasy with.”

Playboy: How would you describe yourself to someone who had never seen or heard you?

Dolly Parton: I would start by saying that I pride myself on being a fair and honest person. I am free and open enough to be able to try new things. I’m outrageous. I feel like I have a lot of depth that only the people closest to me really see. I’m compulsive and very ambitious.

I’m playful. I’m joyful. I’m mischievous. Serious when I mean to be serious. I can be strong when I need to be and weak when I want to be. I can tell you where to put it if I don’t like where you got it. I’m not a very moody person. I don’t fall into great states of depression.

Very sentimental and highly emotional. I’m a baby when it comes to bein’ a baby. I like to be spoiled and petted. I get touched real easy. I’m curious, I have to know everything that goes on. I’m not a brilliant person, but I have a lot of guts. I just don’t have a fear of life.

I love life, so why should I fear somethin’ I love? And why should I not reach out to the things that I know I can touch? I’m strong-willed. I can think like a workingman because I know what a workingman goes through. I’m a person you could sit down with even if you were a total stranger and tell me the thing you thought was the most horrible thing and I would understand it.

And I wouldn’t tell. I’m a good friend. I’m loyal and devoted to the things that I believe in…. I’m full of shit!

Playboy: That’s quite a description. Now, how would you assess your talent?

Parton: I like to be appreciated as a writer and, if not a great singer, at least a stylist and an original, creative person.

Playboy: You don’t feel you’re that good a singer?

Parton: I don’t think so. My manager just hates me to say that, because he says it’s not true. I don’t have a great voice. I have a different voice and I can do things with it that a lot of people can’t. But it’s so delicate in other ways, there’s no way I can do some of the things other singers can.

I just love to sing. It is joyful, it’s something I can scream, it’s a release for me. I used to have a lot of vibrato in my voice. It could almost be real irritating to a lot of people’s ears.

It was a natural thing for me, but some people say, “You sound like you been eating billy goat.” Bah, bah. I guess I overdone it, so I tried to learn at takin’ some of the vibrato out. I would like to improve my voice to be able to hit better notes.

My notes are not always true. But my heart is always true. And the emotion I put in is always true.

Read Dolly’s full Playboy Interview here.

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Foreplay starts hours before anyone is naked. Dinner. His knee against mine under the table for two seconds longer than an accident. Still, very few men understand this as actual foreplay, that desire is built, and that the best moments in bed are not choreography, they’re problem solving in real time.

Which brings me to the greatest single move a man has ever pulled off in my sexual life. It deserves a plaque.

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Tuesday night. His couch, then his hallway, then his bedroom, moving the way you move when you can’t stop kissing long enough to look where you’re going. Furniture is a mere obstacle. Clothes come off somewhere between rooms.

Then the record scratch. I had my period. More to the point, I had forgotten I had a tampon in.

This is where it usually stalls. The bathroom intermission. “Give me one second,” which means the mood is now sitting alone in the bedroom checking its phone. Passion on hold while a woman deals with plumbing.

I was naked, wrapped around him, still kissing him, and I just said it into his mouth in a voice that was trying to be sultry and landed somewhere near apologetic. “I have to go to the bathroom, I have a tampon in.”

We kept kissing. He reached down, found the string, pulled it out, dropped it on the floor, and put me on the bed. Never stopped. Never looked.

That was it. Best move in the history of heterosexual relations.

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No man before or after has handled that reality so cleanly. Not in 17 years of marriage. Not in the years since. One man, who understood that wanting me did not require an intermission because of a little blood.

Obviously his desire eclipsing my period was extremely sexy—not all men will go there. But it’s not just that he wanted me, it’s that he knew what to do. There is an intelligence that only shows up in instinct. Deal with what’s actually happening instead of flinching from it. That’s the whole difference between a man who has read about women and a man who has been with one.

I’m telling you this partly to be provocative. Mostly it’s a public service. It isn’t about tampons. It’s about seeing the thing between you and her, removing it, and not making a speech about it.

Everything about sex has gotten complicated. Competence is still the sexiest thing in the room. Solve the problem. Touch what other men are afraid to touch. Class dismissed.

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It is, somehow, still the summer of the 250th anniversary of the United States. Yes, I know we’re all ready for autumn, but let’s enjoy it while we can. And what better way than with the beautiful women of America’s small towns, originally published in the August 1996 issue? This one’s got it all—girls on bikes, girls on boats, girls on bridges. The full, uncensored pictorial is available on Playboy.com. You’ll notice, too, a changing of the seasons throughout the pictorial. Come on, take a look at that foliage.

— , Senior Editor

In the final scene of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy reminds us that, despite the razzmatazz of Oz, her Kansas community has its pluses. We’d now like to add a plus of our own: Small-town women are lookers. “Every day, beautiful women from tiny townships send us their pictures,” says PLAYBOY’S Senior Photo Editor Jim Larson. “We finally said, ‘Hey, forget the big city—let’s honor the hometown girl.’” Winnowing down the list was the first step (”the smaller the town the better”); then PLAYBOY’S photo corps hit the road. “But this wasn’t like jetting down to Atlanta for a quick shoot,” Larson continues. “It was more like getting on one plane, transferring to a smaller one, then taking a three-hour car ride out to a place that’s barely on the map.” But, Larson reports, the treks were worth the effort. “Not only were the women fresh and down-to-earth, but the folks we met along the way were delightful. They were so flattered that PLAYBOY would make such a long trip just to visit their town.” Call it civic pride, call it a knockout pictorial. Either way, Dorothy is right: There’s no place like home.

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CHRISTY OWENS

Gravel Switch, KY (pop. 75)

Above, Christy graces the porch of Penn’s Store, known as the oldest family-run country store in America. Among Penn’s events: “Whittling & Fiddling” shindigs and “The Great Outhouse Blowout.”

JACKI MORRISON

Robinson, IL (pop. 6740)

Jacki (hanging loose on a caboose, below) was born in Illinois, raised in Texas and attended college in California—but she packed it all up for the pocket-size city of Robinson. Some towns have all the luck.

TRACY LYNN RICHLAND

Bluffton, SC (pop. 738)

Bluffton doesn’t have a hockey team, so Tracy Lynn (below and on bicycle) prefers to call the Pittsburgh Penguins her own. Off the ice, she’s a fan of chocolate and her pups.

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LESLI ANN SCHRAUDEN

Portland, MI (pop. 3889)

Sampling the bridges of Portland, Michigan (above), Lesli Ann is no stranger to the Midwest. She attended high school in Oshkosh and college in Kalamazoo. When she’s not doing crosswords, she’s plotting her business career.

BRITT MORRIS

Philipsburg, PA (pop. 3048)

By land or by lake, Britt (below in kayak and clothed on land) is a true girl of summer. “We have baseball fever here,” she says. “My grandfather pitched for the St. Louis Browns in the minors and my mother worked for a major-league baseball team. We love the game.”

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SHELBY HERRINGTON

Ballston Spa, NY (pop. 4937)

Shelby (in the brisk outdoors and bundled below) says the perfect way to take in her home state’s beauty is to “visit historical sites.” Otherwise, she’s content with being inside—provided indoors is a mall. Shelby also rides horses, loves the scent of vanilla and collects The Wizard of Oz memorabilia

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CINDY ROUBAL

Bruno, NB (pop. 141)

“I grew up in this very small town,” says Cindy (below with and without overalls), “where my mom works in a bar and my dad owns a gas station.” The upshot? “I’ll always enjoy the simple pleasures of life—like early mornings, fresh coffee and the clean smell of rain.” Nebraska, here we come.

Welcome to Playboy Undercover—where our anonymous columnists give you a peek of what’s really going on, well, under the covers. From the curious to the downright kinky, our guides are pulling back the curtains on desire. Wanna invite us undercover? So long as it’s between two (or more!) consenting adults, we’re game. Send your story to eic@playboy.com.

It is worth starting with three facts, which is that I am a straight woman, I am a chronic people pleaser, and I hate sex.

Broadly speaking, I think I’ve just always hated my body, not necessarily for its aesthetics, but because I dislike the business of having a body. Except for feeding it, I find all other body-related tasks pretty annoying. Things like having to put my body to sleep (does anyone like drooling against their will?). Having to take it to an orthopedist because its left thumb is sore. Having to drive an hour to get its hair trimmed. Having to lie to fitness instructors that my body is extremely injured so they don’t make it run more than 3 MPH. But no doubt the worst part of having a body is living in a scary society that has normalized bodies touching in a romantic and/or sexual context.

Unsurprisingly, my first experience with sex was a negative one. It involved my high school boyfriend, with whom I planned to lose my virginity the night before leaving for college. He took me to his bedroom (i.e. the garage where he had set down a sheet for us on the concrete floor and turned on all the fluorescent lights. It was an unsettling scene, but instead of saying anything, I immediately took off all my clothes and laid down like a corpse. In the end, he was flaccid, and I was cold (physically, not emotionally), so things did not go well.

Since then, sex has been a series of mild disappointments. There are a variety of tactics I compulsively deploy to keep men from touching me or wanting to touch me again. Whether it’s claiming I have a condition where my period lasts for months, asking about their mothers as they orgasm, or simply farting, I will do almost anything to get out of, or prematurely end, sex. I have literally run away in the middle of intercourse – or more like the beginning because I don’t remember being more than two or three thrusts into the process – with the guy chasing after me asking if it was because I had “finished”. These antics may not paint the picture of a woman who likes to please, but given how irritating I find sex, I think it’s pretty generous and merciful that I put out at all.

But the hardest part of sex, beyond the constant threat of UTIs, is navigating my own pleasure in relation to someone else’s. I’ve only been able to orgasm externally while masturbating, and I’ve been pretty content with this DIY approach. Because physical contact with males has ranged from slightly painful to mediocre at best, I’ve found little motivation to pursue it.

People have asked if I’m asexual, and my honest answer is that I don’t think so, but I’m too busy to confirm. Who has the hours, weeks, years needed to investigate the difference between asexual, graysexual, sex-averse, sex-indifferent and all the other ways one can self-define sexuality these days. Life is short, and there are so many other things I’d rather Google, like spider paws (cute!) and inverted pendulums (cool!).

I was very content to continue my body-unaware, sex-avoidant life, until I approached my 35th birthday, and the internet started plying me with evidence I was old and dying. After months of a targeted attack by the algorithmic gods where I was fed ads suggesting I needed a “mini” facelift, blood “oil change,” and trip to Korea to scan my entire body for disease, I had no choice but to reckon with my mortality. It hit me that my body was a limited resource, and like a discount code about to expire, I should probably start using it for stuff (ideally the kind of stuff that helps my body live longer and less painfully).

That’s how I ended up on the phone with the infamous O-Man, an orgasm expert and miracle bodyworker a friend had paid to give her over an hour of therapeutic ecstasy (ie. nonstop orgasms). Apparently the O-Man was a physical trainer living in LA who had discovered a precise, physiological formula for the female orgasm and has now devoted his life to teaching women how to orgasm more easily. According to my friend, if the goal was to find ways to enjoy being in my body, what better way than to have more orgasms, which many people claim is an enjoyable sensation? Also, knowing my aversion to sex, she thought O-Man could help me cultivate a willingness to sleep with my current boyfriend (a color blind Minnesotan named Bryan), whom I proudly hadn’t touched in ages.

I promptly reassured her everything was great with Bryan because he loved me so much he found our minimal sex life to be “totally fine for now.”

“Just contact O-Man through his website. He’ll create a bespoke program for you based on what your body needs and work with you on the quote,” she encouraged. “I think you’d learn a lot. Plus, orgasms actually shut down the prefrontal cortex, which reduces anxiety and fear and boosts your body’s recovery systems,” she read from an article neither of us had the scientific literacy to understand.

“I like having fear and anxiety. They’re useful emotions that help me make informed, cautious decisions,” I retorted.

After calling me a loser, she left me to my existential spiral.

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With Bryan’s blessing (“If this is something you’re curious about, I think you should go for it”), I contacted O-Man, who I’ll just call Hamilton, because I signed an NDA not to reveal his identity, and that was also the name of my beloved childhood hamster. Three weeks later (Hamilton’s earliest availability), I had my introductory phone call.

He first asked me where I felt tight (a genuine musculoskeletal question, not a suggestive one), and I responded, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He tried to reframe and asked, “How does your body feel right now?” which seemed like an escalation of an already hostile trick question.

“Uh…my body is normally one feeling. Unless there is some kind of extreme pain,” I replied.

After grilling me with more onboarding questions, Hamilton concluded, in kinder terms than I’m about to paraphrase, that I basically had such a profound lack of body awareness it would be almost impossible for him to help me remotely (an option he offers clients who are more in touch with themselves or located far away, even though people fly in from all over the world to see him), and it’d be much better if I saw him in person.

“I’m going to make you feel completely different in your body and make you orgasm every way you can, and in the one percent chance that doesn’t happen during our session, I’ll give you the resources and additional help to make that happen on your own.”

His methodology, built on discoveries about muscle imbalance by Czech neurologist and physiotherapist Vladimir Janda, focuses on postural therapy and muscle quality. He claims that his methods have led to orgasms as a fortuitous, but often essential, byproduct for over 600 female clients. Fun fact: Masters and Johnson only studied 382 women.

Hamilton told me that his system works 97% of the time. The 3% that has failed, which haunts him to this day, were all women he saw six years ago at the beginning of his practice, when he was still refining his technique. Nowadays, in the unlikely event someone can’t climax during a session with him, they’re always able to after they do his homework, he says. Even, he thought, someone like me.

Still highly suspicious of any man interested in touching me (even if I was paying him to), I asked him to share anonymous testimonials from happy clients.

From “rolling orgasms” after an inability to have even one to a woman who “felt as if something ruptured inside” her, the reviews were pretty convincing. “Beyond the impressive awakening to pleasure is the way my body and mind continue to feel after our sessions- lighter, more limber, totally pain free with a completely relaxed central nervous system — leaving me feeling calm and centered,” one woman wrote.

For someone whose favorite version of sex is the dissociated kind (a sort of best-worst-case-scenario, if you will), it was intriguing to hear that my mind could be off thinking about things like ecological collapse or my cat’s upcoming dental appointment and I could still experience a barrage of orgasms as long as my body was aligned and the right muscles were relaxed. It sounded so…chill? His signature service was basically a starfish-pillow-princess’s wet dream. Plus, I appreciated that his approach was less “you need my penis” and more “allow me to guide your body towards healing and pleasure.” So I wrote him back and scheduled my appointment.

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With the threat of sex on the horizon, my body attempted its classic defense of menstruating immediately, like a startled cephalopod squirting ink to escape. Normally my period would be the perfect out, but because I had already paid for the session and was super motivated to not waste money in this economy, I told Hamilton I needed 3 to 5 days to bleed before I was ready, to which he emailed back, “Ok.”

When I stood outside Hamilton’s North Hollywood apartment complex two weeks later, it was the first time in my life I was meeting a total stranger for sex stuff. The symptoms I usually experience prior to physical contact with males — difficulty breathing, peripheral vision loss, super sweaty armpits — were present, but not nearly as bad. Maybe it was because I knew Hamilton was a specialist with the equivalent of a 5 Star Yelp rating in sex, which I can’t say of any other man I’ve been with. I reminded myself I didn’t have to worry about interacting with his genitals, so there was really nothing to fear (he actually doesn’t allow it — he warns if you try to grab him or to convert the situation into sex, which a few unruly women have attempted, he will kick you out). As I waited for him to meet me, I kept repeating the mantra, “You won’t see his penis,” in an effort to self-soothe, but it only kinda worked.

Eventually a pleasant looking man in a T-shirt and sweatpants appeared at the door and let me inside. I respected that Hamilton didn’t try to do anything crazy, like shake my hand or make too much eye contact. His demeanor was rather professional, if a bit clinical and remote. I was completely silent as I followed him down the hallway to his apartment.

Out of nowhere, he announced, “Your outfit’s really cool.” Note: I too was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. He then noticed my furry Crocs and remarked, “Shoes like those are better for your posture because they don’t constrict your feet. A lot of women come here wearing heels, and it’s bad for their alignment.” It was the first time a man had lavished so much praise on my dumpy appearance.

Things were going great for about 30 seconds until we walked into his apartment, and I discovered it was, first and foremost, a visually overwhelming gym. I didn’t realize I’d be expected to orgasm in a literal metal cage surrounded by weights, bars and ropes. He did warn me beforehand his apartment was a gym, but I thought he meant he just had a few dumbbells lying around. He made no attempt at ambiance beyond playing FKA Twigs, who I admittedly love. Before I could get too upset by the visual reminder of exercise (something I hate more than sex), Hamilton gave my body a quick once-over and said, “I can tell you’re a writer.”

“Hah! But I already told you I was a writer,” I replied, confident I had just beat him at whatever mind game this was.

“Yes, but I can also tell from your elevated shoulder and forward head posture and the way your hands drop more forward. You just have a lot of arm and neck tension, which affects your tonic muscles, which affects your pelvic floor, which affects your orgasms.” he said.

In order for a stiff, sedentary writer like myself to orgasm a lot in our two hour session, Hamilton apparently had to release tension in my joints and skeletal muscles ASAP. He directed me to stand on a vibrating platform, close my eyes, hold onto a support rail and relax my body. After about a minute, he asked, “What do you notice happening?”

“I am vibrating,” I responded proudly.

“No… I mean, what’s happening to your body. Can you feel what’s changing?”

“Beyond the vibrations?”

“Yes.”

“Then no,” I replied.

This little dance continued for about 15 minutes. Him guiding me expertly around the gym. Massaging me with a Theragun. Administering some kind of physical therapy to supposedly “lengthen my muscles,” then asking if I noticed anything, and me responding, always, “No.”

After completing the physio part of the program, Hamilton told me to disrobe so he could start making me orgasm “as much as possible.”

I was horrified. Now?! So soon??? Naturally the first thing I had to ask was, “Can I at least keep my socks on?”

“You can keep on whatever you want, but it’ll probably be easier for me to make you orgasm if I can at least access your vagina,” he replied.

Touché, sir.

So I took off all my clothes, save for my bright red socks, and laid down on his couch, which I appreciated was wrapped in a fresh cover. Once again, I was cold.

Hamilton came back holding what looked like a black karaoke mic. “Have you ever used an external vibrator?”

I quickly replied, “No. Is that okay?”

He nodded. Unfazed by dealing with a total n00b, he proceeded to adjust my position on the couch, telling me to close my eyes, stretch my arms and extend my legs in a way that looked awkward, but was undeniably correct because within a few seconds of him touching me with that vibrator thingy, I had three back to back orgasms unlike anything I’d ever experienced on my own. I felt waves of chills along my inner thighs, the parts of my body he said were the most tense. It was the first time I’ve actually seen stars during sex (a phenomenon Hamilton explained was just increased blood flow and hormones flooding my brain — not a stroke), which was all deeply upsetting because it meant I was no longer a part of the demographic of women-who-men-haven’t-made-orgasm I so strongly identified with before.

Despite feeling shell-shocked, I followed Hamilton to the bedroom for the second half of the procedure, where he claimed he would make me orgasm even more. First, he had me lay down on a vibrating bed. Then, he put my feet on a platform that was also vibrating. Afterwards, he whipped out what looked like a dildo attached to a vibrating Theragun, expertly applied lube, and slowly pushed it inside me. I immediately told him it was too deep and felt exactly like my gynecologist scraping my cervix for a pap smear. He quickly adjusted, and then things felt shockingly good. Within minutes, I had my first ever G-spot orgasm, quickly followed by my first ever “blended orgasm” (a phrase I strongly dislike). It was insane.

I immediately asked, “Does everything around me need to be vibrating in order for me to orgasm?”

He kindly responded, “No. It’s not the vibrations. It’s really the way your body is positioned that allows certain muscles to completely relax. An orgasm is a trainable, physical response, and it’s one of the most complete activations of your autonomic nervous system.”

What was miraculous was that for the next hour, he continued to use the same two sex devices on me while I laid in his vibrating bed. He would periodically ask me to adjust my body in ways I would never think to do, with surprising movements that weren’t inherently pleasurable or sexy, like turning my head or stretching my left toes or holding open my jaw, but they somehow always led to an orgasm that completely blindsided me. Hamilton would know when I was going to climax well before I did. He was like the Nostradamus of female orgasms (a reference I hope turns many people on). I was directed to close my eyes, so I had no idea what he was doing down there, but it was obviously working.

At a certain point, he asked the offensive question, “How many orgasms did you have just now?” — which I found impossible to answer. I had never had this large a number and this large a variety of orgasms, so I really had no idea how to count them. I was either having one super long orgasm or a nonstop sequence of shorter orgasms. I honestly started to find the relentless orgasms annoying because they made it nearly impossible to interview him.

“STOP!” I shouted. I had had enough of all this pleasure. I told Hamilton I needed a break because my body felt like it was going to explode. He obliged, of course.

During our recess, I tried to probe into his history, hoping to uncover celebrity gossip or other salacious material. “Who are your other clients? Anyone fun?”

“There’s a big range. I get conservative women. Divorcees. Celebrities. Couples. I just think everybody deserves a chance to feel as good as they can, in a functional body, and to not feel broken. Some of my favorite clients are women with serious injuries or chronic illnesses like MS who didn’t think their bodies were capable, or trans women who get to orgasm for the first time after gender reassignment surgery. I’ve helped women in their late 40s work on their bodies, and it improved their fertility. That’s the work I’m really proud of.”

His saintly response was not the scandalous tea I wanted, so I told him to just go back to making me orgasm. And he did.

After 1.5 hours of orgasms, Hamilton turned off the music, and my sex therapy was finally over.

He then told me, “What you just experienced was the bare minimum your body is capable of. If you continue practicing these techniques, stabilizing and strengthening the muscles in your deep core, your orgasms will consistently be better and more intense” — which was very alarming to hear, because my body could barely handle the orgasms it had just experienced. No one was asking for them to be “more intense.”

“Weird question but as a professional, you can fully divorce your own sexual… reaction… for lack of a better word, from these experiences, even if you’re doing more involved stuff to your clients?” I asked in the fetal position after noticing the very polite absence of his boner.

“Someone asking me for help is not about my enjoyment. I think being earnest about anything where you can feel especially vulnerable is a terrifying proposition. Asking a man on the internet to make you cum a lot has to be one of the most vulnerable positions someone can be in, and I have an obligation toward anyone with enough actual bravery to do that to be fully present and make sure they have nothing to worry about,” he said, worrying me that he might be more empyrean than man.

As I sat on the couch with my legs in a giant foot and calf massager, Hamilton explained all the post-treatment materials he was sending me home with so I could align myself and/or orgasm on my own. I told him there was no chance I could understand it all without his guidance, which is when he proudly revealed he’s been developing a series of apps that will use muscle diagnostics to help people release tension, allowing anyone to access his movement system for their fitness, recovery, or sex goals. He’s patenting his discoveries and will likely branch out into smart devices in the near future, some of them sex-focused, he said.

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My body left Hamilton’s place feeling pretty shocked by what just went down. It felt buzzy and shaky and very overwhelmed by all the new sensations. I was astonished when my body willingly hugged Hamilton goodbye, something it almost never does after a sexual encounter. Per our agreement, I promised I would text him when I got home and would follow up the morning after so he could make sure everything was okay. Apparently some women crash their cars after seeing him because they’re so blissed out. Orgasms: good for health, bad for driving.

As I drove at a cautious 50 MPH on the 101, I had the revelation that every woman should pay for sex at least once in her life. Or rather, every woman should go see Hamilton, because calling what he does sex is maybe reductive to the scope of his craft. My experience with him was more like the ultimate full body massage that gave me a complete physical and mental reset. What he really provides, above all else, is a luxury wellness experience, and it was worth every dollar.

When I got home, Bryan was waiting up to make sure I’d survived the perilous journey. Despite feeling like I was high on drugs and had maybe been kicked — ever so slightly — in the vagina, I cheerily recounted every detail of my encounter with Hamilton. Bryan hugged and kissed me and said he was very proud. He even called me “fearless.”

“Should we buy some vibrators?” he asked.

“Probably,” I said.

We did buy the vibrator (Hamilton recommends the Lovense Domi 2 or ones by FemmeFunn after testing all of them) but, so far the only thing I’ve been able to give myself is a headache, not an orgasm. It’s my fault though. I haven’t really been sticking to O-Man’s program Changes I will admit to are that I kinda like having sex with my boyfriend now, certainly more than I did before Sex feels newer (even after 6 years) and like something maybe worthy of time and exploration, even if the results are imperfect. I like to think I’m a little more aligned, a little more relaxed, a little more in my body. I’m not sure if I really am, but at least there’s the genuine possibility of it being true.

Some might consider O-Man’s work to be taboo, but maybe some taboos are a gift? If a serious anti-sexxer like me could appreciate going to him, then anyone can. There’s something satisfying, and obviously liberating, about subverting society’s moral bounds only to realize you’re better off (and better aligned) for it.

I think back to the stars I saw during the first insane orgasms with O-Man, when I started to realize the limits of my body might be endless. Maybe the stars were my body’s attempt to create the sublime, that experience of being briefly overwhelmed by something larger than the self can contain. The body, at its limit, must create its own phenomena. But it does not go dark at the edge. It illuminates.

This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

Most wars begin with a set of questions: What do we fear? What is possible? What will they do to us? What will we do to them? Unfortunately, prewar imaginings are rarely very accurate. Any sustained study of human conflict becomes a shadow study of mistaken assumptions, magical thinking, and hubristic overconfidence. Thus, every war is fought three times: first in the imagination, then in reality, and finally in memory.

It typically takes citizens a long time to turn against wars launched in their name. It’s largely a myth, for instance, that the American war in Vietnam was undone by public opinion. On January 31, 1968, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, a tactically brilliant but militarily doomed operation that saw virtually every city across South Vietnam suffer a coordinated surprise attack. For years, American officials had claimed their demoralized enemies were on the ropes. The moment at which the final, decisive blow would fall was so anticipated that it became known as “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Tet exposed this cheerleading as either ruinously wishful or outright deceptive. And yet, in Tet’s immediate aftermath, many Americans did not abandon the war, support for which reached 61 percent, according to a Gallup poll conducted at the time. For these citizens, the offensive proved that more American elbow grease (and blood) was needed. Only in the months and years that followed Tet did public confidence erode. The abyss between what America had imagined was possible and the grim reality it occupied had become impossible for average citizens to ignore.

Every war will have its opponents and defenders. What binds them is the socio-imaginative context in which all wars are fought, only part of which involves the battlefield. In time, these contexts often harden into national mythology. Sometimes that mythology aligns with where a war sits in our collective imagination, as with the holy meat grinders of the U.S. Civil War and World War II. When imagination and mythology diverge, however—as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—the myth ruptures, often messily and always painfully. In Vietnam, the scale of that rupture took years to fully register. Even when it did, Americans and Vietnamese went on fighting and dying for another half decade.

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David Halberstam’s “The Americanization of Vietnam,” one of the most powerful critiques of America’s divergent presence in Southeast Asia, was published by this magazine in January 1970. It was the culmination of a series of antiwar articles run by Playboy, a magazine widely read by the young men fighting in Vietnam. (“One of the things that made my Vietnam tour endurable was seeing Playboy every month,” a soldier wrote the magazine upon returning home.) Halberstam had been in and out of South Vietnam since the early 1960s, back when only a few thousand American military advisers were trying, and mostly failing, to turn the tide against the country’s Communist insurgency. “Now,” Halberstam writes, “we are both the initiator and the victim of a hopeless, bitter war that has ripped aside so many of our more comfortable illusions about ourselves. … Where once we had few doubts about American capacity, American intentions, American achievement, now we have more doubts about that capacity to deal with social problems, not just in Southeast Asia or Latin America, but at home.” It was almost as if the American experience in Vietnam removed our very ability to imagine.

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Few who start a war expect to lose, and no one losing a war can be expected to admit it, especially in a politically divided country. It’s thus important for leaders about to wage war to set the imaginative parameters—to develop and communicate a firm idea of what they’re trying to accomplish and why. The more abstract and formless the goal, the likelier it is that their war will become unrecognizably mutant even to its supporters, or, worse, transform into a cruelly revealing mirror. Halberstam again: “Now we have blanketed [South Vietnam] with our men, our ideas, our institutions and our failures. We have learned, I think, more about ourselves than the Vietnamese.”

War, especially in democratic societies, is rarely presented as destruction. Citizens are instead asked to envision a better world just beyond the bomb crater: stabilized regions, liberated peoples, humbled enemies. With the rise of modern media, selling a war under these auspices has never been easier. Even brutal military campaigns can be portrayed as heroic bids for renewal. The architects of war narrate, transforming uncertainty into inevitability, violence into authorship. This is a storytelling exercise with one subject: how history itself can be bent through force. But delusion is a subspecies of imagination. The tragedy isn’t that these stories so often fail. It’s rather that war possesses an unparalleled ability to make fantasies appear temporarily plausible. Only later, after insurgencies form and body counts accumulate and the promised future refuses to arrive, does the original act of war reveal itself as the vandalism it was.

The United States attacked Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan under different pretexts and with different goals, but in every instance, the delusion was identical: the belief that violence, skillfully wielded, can change hearts. As Halberstam writes, the major accomplishment of the war in Vietnam was to create “a generation of cynical Vietnamese who smelled where the money was—in the ports, in the construction business, in the selling of draft deferments. … The Americans talked about [Vietnamese] corruption but could do nothing. Their presence, after all, had created it.”

The simple fact is that few wars—even just wars, even successful wars—give a nation the results it sought. Instead, war unveils a prismatic set of outcomes few expected and fewer still would have chosen. This harsh reality has, if nothing else, made the leaders of most modern democracies highly circumspect about sending their warriors into danger, to say nothing of inflicting horrific violence on combatants and noncombatants alike.

Whatever shape America’s current struggle with the Islamic Republic of Iran ultimately takes, it represents something new in our national experience. Nothing was concocted to preemptively justify it. No final goal has been consistently put forth to explain why it’s happening. Its complications were, by all available evidence, neither contemplated nor anticipated despite their abundant predictability. As most unpopular wars grind on, imagination often gives way to desperation: The things we could achieve if only we landed warheads here and here and here! This war is different—a war of no imagination, of null imagination. While previous wars were sold as fantasies of transformation, this one barely pretends to promise anything at all, unless you’re unusually stirred by the prospect of Iran’s navy collecting barnacles at the bottom of the Red Sea.

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Consider George W. Bush’s Iraq War, the most emblematically imaginative war America has waged—less a war, in many ways, than a series of failed marketing campaigns. First came the New Coke of Weapons of Mass Destruction, then the Crystal Pepsi of Middle Eastern Democracy, followed by the Classic Coke of Avoiding National Humiliation. One would think that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, as highly lacquered television creatures, would have understood the necessity of presenting their nation with the usual imaginative aspirations while the bombs and rockets were prepped for Iran. Apparently, they did not. For the first time in its history, the United States embarked on a consequential war with virtually no warning or lead-up. During Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, American citizens were forced to swallow the snake oil of wartime optimism, but this war has given us something more insidious: a Defense Department so keen to emphasize its “lethality” that it might as well be standing on a street corner, in a trench coat, selling snuff films.

The Iranian government, with its Lego memes and insult-comic tweets, doesn’t have this problem. A war designed to prevent its mullahcracy from developing nuclear weapons has instead established for that same mullahcracy the absolute tactical necessity of developing nuclear weapons, if only to ensure it will never be similarly humiliated. To reaffirm every enemy aspiration you sought to disrupt while also accomplishing nothing is itself an inversely impressive achievement.

The American experiment, whatever it is or was, has long operated on one imaginative override: an unwavering belief in itself—and in its capacity. The misbegotten wars of our past broke and traumatized us because of the very intensity of that collective belief. At some point during every botched, unwise war we’ve waged, the punch-drunk realization eventually dawned: This is not who we are. Now we’re stuck in a conflict that literally no one believes in—not the people waging it, not the people defending it, not the people fighting it. And soon the time will come to rip away, yet again, our comfortable illusions about ourselves. Maybe this is who we are. Maybe it’s who we’ve always been.

This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

Isn’t it always the case that your favorite clothes look best when she’s taking them off? That’s the inspiration behind stylist and Office Magazine editor-in-chief Simon Rasmussen’s style spread in our Summer 2026 issue. Model Laura Avery shows off menswear at its best—a blend of classic style and sex appeal. Maybe you’ll find some style inspiration for yourself, or maybe you’ll learn what you need to let your girlfriend borrow.

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‘80s shoulders without the costume

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Where the money went

Caught, not sorry

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Playboy Members are seeing a lot more than this. Don’t miss the rest of the shoot. Unlock the full pictorial.

This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

By Nash Jenkins

They spent the afternoon planting wheat. They planted it within the stone walls of the plot behind the house, and what made this work—what made it take the afternoon—was the task of clearing what had been there before: The plot was where the apiary had been, which months earlier they had enclosed within spruce fencing under a roof of oak. The bees had either left or died—either way there was no honey, no honeycomb—and for several months it had sat there as an empty shelter. He’d been busy with other projects, and when they passed by it each morning he made a note to sharpen his axe that afternoon and save the spruce when it was demolished, only to let the other projects take the full day.

They had hacked up the desolate hives and dug up the damp darkened earth where they’d sat to retrieve the hoppers they’d planted there: The hoppers had collected the honeycomb that had fallen from the full hives, passing it down their long sequences to the barrels he’d crafted years before that formed the cellar’s back wall.

He’d been wanting to expand the sugarcane farm, but the apiary had been empty for too long, and its now-silent hoppers could be put to use elsewhere. “You’re always getting distracted when we’re in the middle of things,” River said to him once. “It’s like we start something and right away you get another idea.” He ignored this, though his son was right. He did not tell the boy—whom he still called a boy even now at 14—that this was indeed the magic he found in things. The new world was vacant and its horizon flat and boundless, and the only thing to do was to set out each morning and continue the work of filling it. The magic was how this itself had come to be sufficient as a life and not just a means to it, and how in doing so it distracted him from what otherwise would be fears. Without it, he might step back and give these fears a name. He might see that what for him was magic was for River simply life, and that one day, River might seek a magic of his own.

They would later collect the wheat in their bundles; for now, these bundles held the saplings from the oaks along the shore and the husks of black flint from the cavern beneath it. There was only so much inventory they could carry, and before setting out each morning they went down to the cabin’s cellar. Things were safer here at night, and because sometimes their days went long, they took with them each morning only what the day’s work required.

“Is there still mutton?” River asked him as they threshed the land. “In the cellar. Do we have any left?”

He stopped threshing and turned to look at his son. Most days they worked in silence, and it was moments like this that felt arbitrary and cruel in how they suddenly returned him to the world left behind. You gonna cry? his own father had said to him once in the car; he couldn’t recall where they’d been going, only that it had been after dinnertime and he said from the backseat that he was hungry. The magic he found in the work—in the planting of wheat, in the mining of ores, in the sorting of their inventory into barrels for the things it would go on to build—was in how it kept at bay what was no longer: things like Applebee’s and passports and Hampton Inns; things like roommates and coworkers; things like fatherhood. Most of the time, there was a luxuriousness to their impossibility. Like these other things,   fatherhood as a concept had been nullified with the end of the old world, requiring as it did the presence of homes and yards beyond one’s own to differentiate a family from those who were not in it.

River did not look up from the plot of earth he seeded after he asked the question. In the facelessness of his son’s stout shape he felt something inside himself dislodge and tremble, and as he looked at his son they were suddenly back in the old world, more tactile but less vibrant. River did not know what dinnertime was, or breakfast or lunch; they ate before work and after. His son did not have a name for hunger as a concept, or for fear, or for anger: This was by design. When he saw in River an awareness of these nameless things, he found himself returned to what had been abandoned. He had learned in these moments to pause, to will himself to remember that they were the lucky ones.

“Yes. There is some mutton left.”

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The world as river knew it was 17 years old. He had come to refer to what preceded it—and his father had never really corrected him—as “before I was born”: Under the benign narcissism of childhood, all of history (or at least modernity) is rewritten and compressed into the infinitely expansive and infinitesimally compressed moment of vacant blackness that precedes their own arrival. It’s how he would have been taught in school that the universe itself had been born, were there such a thing as school.

“We’re safer now.” This was what River’s father had told him when he was old enough to understand that the world as he knew it was not the world as it had been.

The world was still light when the last squares of dirt were seeded with wheat, so before returning they retrieved their fishing rods from the chest by the cabin door. As they’d finished planting in silence, he’d thought of how his father had looked at him when he asked about the mutton, and tilling the last of his land he found himself seized with something sickly and vicious, something that made the vacant flatness of the world feel distant and unreal. And as they stood on the banks of the lagoon and cast their rods for fish, these were the feelings that gave form to the question he had asked many times before. He knew it was not to be asked here, and he did not grasp that this was why he asked it.

“The world before I was born—was it a lot like this?”

He asked this question aware that there was an offense in it. He did not know the word afraid for what it seemed to awaken in his father, but he had sensed it before: at night, mostly, when they returned from the world and the shape and color of things became realer. Sometimes his father screamed in his sleep.

His father did not answer, but that evening when they retreated from the world, he pulled out a box from beneath the ladder. It was different than the barrels in the cellar: Its edges were softer and paler, its texture and weight present in his hands. On the side of the box were red shapes; he did not know they were called letters, and that letters formed words, and that these words read OfficeMax.

Inside this box were many pages, and upon them were images. In their details and shadows these images looked like what River saw through his own eyes, except these images lacked what River may or may not have known was called color. “It wasn’t like this. We’re safer now.” His father smiled as he watched River look down at the images, and River understood without understanding that his father meant for him to be frightened by what he saw in them.

In fact, they conjured in him a feeling he did not know was called longing. For one, in these images there were other people. As far as he knew—and his father had told him this was true—he had never seen another person, only his father. The people in these images looked like his father, but the strange ways in which they didn’t made him want to stare longer at them. There were many of them in a single image. Their faces were contorted, their mouths agape, the sky behind them swallowed in smoke and flame. Some of them were crying. (He knew what it meant to cry.) Some of them lay on what looked like thin white beds; they seemed to be asleep.

Some looked more unlike his father than others. Their hair was longer, their bodies leaner. Something about their faces was kinder. He did not know the word woman. In one image, one of these people lay alone, their leg broken at a strange angle; their mouth was open and their face looked wet with something dark. Their clothes were ripped; their naked stomach was softer than his father’s.

River wanted to look at this image for longer than he had wanted to look at the others. He felt a strange tension in his pants, and he realized that his penis was growing firm. This happened sometimes, in the mornings, and when it did his penis looked like his father’s, but this was different: When his father pulled the image away River had an urge to take it back and look at it longer. He asked his father who the person was, and his father replied.

“What does that mean?” he asked his father.

“What does what mean?”

“She.”

His father said it meant nothing, and River went to sleep thinking about She. With time, she left his mind, and when the strange happy fizz in his brain and his loins went away, it was replaced with fear as his mind returned to the other images. What frightened him was the world as it looked before he was born. The shapes in it were familiar but not. There were many houses that weren’t their own—bigger, too close together. What scared him was how they looked not like the world outside their house but the world inside it.

It was in the darkness after his father climbed up the ladder that River returned to the box. River had learned years before to climb the ladder so it would not creak, to hold things up under the thin square of light betrayed by the trapdoor’s sealed edges. It was beneath the pages inside that his hands met the edges of a smaller box, and the cold metal of something he knew was a lock. He remembered the key he’d found one night several years earlier, taped beneath one of the ladder’s rungs. It was still there, and with a strange tensing he retrieved it.

Within the smaller chest were more pages. In the gray half-light he saw they contained the characters he didn’t know were called letters, small and black and in neat even rows. On some of these pages there were also images. Unlike those in the larger chest, there were only three people in these. The one who appeared most often was very small, his face very round and his hair very light.

In others there were two people, side by side. One of them looked like his father, though his hair was shorter, and something about his face made River feel strange and heavy in a way that his father’s did not. So did the face of the person next to him. At first River thought it was She, and at first he felt his penis begin to harden again, but he knew somehow he should not be feeling this way about this person.

He looked at this person for a long time, and later in bed he found this person in his thoughts. They smiled at him, and he felt safe. They said things to him whose meanings he did not know.

Over the next three days, he and his father went out to the woods with their axes. They had the spruce they had saved from the apiary walls, but his father thought they needed more. So they chopped the trees and collected wood, and as they did this River was silent. In his mind was the person from his nighttime thoughts and the strange words she had said to him. There was something about the strange sound of them that made them hard to push away, even though his father often told him to push strange things away, just as his father himself seemed to want to push away things that did not belong to their world. He tried but could not, and he did not know the word beautiful, but he knew that the words made him want to cry.

“You’re quiet today,” his father had said as they returned through the woods to their cabin.

“What is Ethan?” he had asked.

And suddenly the world receded, and there before him was only his father.

“What did you say?”

He allowed himself to say it again, to make realer the strange shape of the word in his head, and when he said it again—Ethan—his father began to strike him. After this he would remember that he had cried as he told his father that the person in his head said it. His father’s face was red, contorted like the faces in the images he’d showed him, and as he beat him he had said, “You’re lying—you’re lying.”

The next day they went out into the world again with their axes to collect more wood.

His name had been Kevin. At night, when he shut the trapdoor behind him and found himself on the precipice of the world left behind, he was aware that it still was.

His parents had died two years before life in the new world began. His father had been sick for several years, and in a different way his mother had been sicker for longer; three months after the leukemia killed his father, he received a telephone call. He did not receive many calls, and so he’d answered, and after confirming that Kevin was Kevin, the officer on the other line told him that his mother had been found in her garage by a neighbor. Kevin’s parents had been 40 when he was born, and afterwards—as his father lamented bitterly—there could be no more; seven weeks after the officer phoned him, he received a second phone call, from a probate attorney, informing him that everything left or sold was his.

He kept working in fitful half-shifts at Best Buy, even though he no longer needed to. He started in Appliances, and for a year he demonstrated the programmable digital screens on Maytag washing machines before finding it in himself to approach Sylvia in the break room. Sylvia was Store 3481’s assistant manager, and though she smelled like cigarettes, the pity with which she looked at him was kinder than what the world provided him otherwise. She told him about strange viruses in Africa, and radiation in their water, and the camps the government was building in Alabama for when the rebellion came; he began to read about these things, and eventually he would know the truth of these warnings. “I—I was wondering if I could be moved to Gaming.” She was eating egg salad, and after chewing and swallowing she looked at him. “You got experience with games?”

“A lot.”

The only birthday party he ever had was his 10th. It had been his mother’s idea—his father had left the house for the afternoon with a look of silent revulsion—and sometime years later he would recognize the cruelty of it: of her lighting candles and bringing the ice cream cake to the table where he sat alone; of leaving the eight other Dixie paper plates and corresponding party hats set around the table once it was clear there would be no guests to claim them. With a leer she had told him to make a wish.

At a quarter ’til four the doorbell rang. When he opened the door he saw Peter Reeves, who got off the school bus at the same stop. He was staring at his Reeboks; 10 feet behind him like a sentry was Peter’s own mother, her lips pursed, clutching the invitation she’d found buried in the garbage. “Happy birthday,” Peter had muttered, shoving the present into Kevin’s chest, not looking at him as he turned.

That night, when his parents went to bed, Kevin went to the Compaq PC in the living room. This was where his father spent his days since being laid off by State Farm the previous winter, doing something he called day trading. On the CD-ROM in the box he removed from Lego wrapping paper were the words SimCity 4. Create and control your own empire! the loading screen beckoned, before taking him to a hilly peninsula, where he was asked to name his new city. Kevin’s World, he typed.

By his 16th birthday he had constructed 419 cities across 22 region maps. The largest, Mountonia, had a population of 3 million across hills connected by a series of monorail lines. He kept his urban areas clean of the dirty industry he relegated to neighboring cities, connected by freeways he laid. Does anyone else have backstories in their heads for their cities? KEmmerich posted on GameTalk.net/SimCity4 that year.

When Mountonia surpassed the population of Chicago, the game began to lag. One night it took several seconds to lay a line of freight rail. He stared at the screen for a long time, and then he clicked to the Natural Disasters button on the left-hand panel. He dispatched the first meteor to the airport, which glowed blindingly white and then left a square of scorched earth where it had stood. It took nine meteors in all to reduce the city to rubble; the ticker in the screen’s corner informed him that the population was now 471.

Five weeks later he had come home from school. He’d spent the day contemplating the grid of water pipes he’d finish laying under New Mountonia, but when he entered the living room he found his father sitting at the computer. Its screen was blue, with the words Fatal Error blinking in small white text, and his father was clicking with frantic haplessness as if it would restore what was lost. When he heard Kevin’s footsteps, he turned to his son, and they stared at each other for a long time. “Fucking—faggot—freak,” his father had said, and with a screwdriver he pried open the CD-ROM tray, removed the disc, and snapped it in two.

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The world that River and his father went out into did not look like where they returned to at the end of the day. The colors in the world were brighter, and touching things in it was different: In fact there was no touch at all, only the occasional spasm of the device in his hands when he fell, or when the zombies came and struck him; unlike when his father struck him, it did not hurt, though he knew it was supposed to. His father, too, looked different there: Like the rest of the world around him, his father’s shape there was simpler, formed by the squares that constituted him. Sometimes he looked over onto his father’s screen and saw what he looked like, and it scared him that he looked that way too.

“We’re going to mine for iron now,” his father said to him when the last of the oak they had hewn was in the barrels, which could carry more than they would appear to. “What about expanding the sugarcane farm?” River asked him, and the question was sincere. He had stopped thinking about the images in the chest. “We need pistons for the sugarcane farm, and we need iron for the pistons,” his father said, and together they retrieved their pickaxes from the tool barrel and set out for the cavern.

For the rest of the day they mined iron, breaking the stone of the cavern’s deepening walls until the ingots tumbled out and bobbed before them. It was a productive day—the iron barrel would be nearly full—and as they stepped out of the cavern into the late afternoon light River allowed himself to speak again.

“Is this real?”

“Is what real?”

“The world.”

His father looked at him. “Do you think it’s real?” he said.

There was something about where they returned to after work that he did not like, but he did not know why. Unlike their cabin in the world, it had no windows, no cellar, and no attic; unlike the light from their cabin’s windows or the empty wooded world beyond it, the light was white and harsh. Here there was no mutton, no apples, and no trees beyond the door to pluck them from; indeed there was no door, only the ladder and the trapdoor above it. Sometimes his father came down the ladder carrying small parcels with characters that formed what he did not know were called words: Doritos; Ritz Bits; Hershey’s Kisses. The word  food was the word for the mutton and apples that populated the inventory bar at the bottom of his screen when he stepped into the world each morning; these realer things he knew only as the things his father brought.

“Yes,” his father said back finally. “It’s real.”

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Gametalk.net’s moderators had opened the site’s Minecraft subforum in the summer of 2010, a year after the first players set out to homestead their worlds. “There are 18.4 quintillion possible worlds in Minecraft,” the game’s founder had said in an interview with IGN.com that autumn. “Each is literally infinite, randomly generated by an algorithm for the player. Each player occupies this world alone.”

Sylvia had moved Kevin to Gaming that winter, and for the first two weeks she supervised him. She filled the midday lulls by telling him what she’d done to prepare herself for the world to come: the days fairly soon when no knock on the door could be trusted, which was why she’d removed her address from the postal service’s delivery list; since then she’d been undisturbed. You oughta do it too, she told him, just as a pretty young pregnant woman approached them, seeking gift advice for a nephew. “You gotta get to know the new big games,” Sylvia told him afterwards. “Be familiar with the systems.”

KEmmerich’s first post on GameTalk.net/Minecraft appeared two months later. My name is Kevin and I’m trying to discover what this whole Minecraft thing is about :)

It was the boys who asked him about Minecraft, boys who had cleaved away from fathers browsing dishwashers or antivirus software and made their way over to Gaming. At first they had frightened him. He had arrived at school the Monday after his 10th birthday party to find a laughing Peter Reeves standing before a gaggle of his friends and giggling girls: “I could see in the kitchen window and not a single person came!” But these boys were different: They liked him, and they stared and nodded with wide eyes at what he had to say, and sometimes a few weeks later he’d see them again, passing by Gaming as they followed their fathers to Printers or Wearable Tech, and with nervous happiness they’d wave and say, “Hey, Kevin!” At first he recoiled at the looks their fathers gave him, but with time he learned he could simply pretend they weren’t there.

By the following summer he was posting to the forum several times a day. His profile identified his world’s identifying number as 489352872817. I am thinking about getting started on multiplayer with someone who’s never played, he wrote in June 2014. Any tips for getting them hooked?

It was around this time that he saw the pretty blonde pregnant woman who had come looking for a gift for her nephew. She was no longer pregnant, and in the stroller she pushed was a small blond baby; the footballs and dinosaurs on his onesie told Kevin he was a boy. The boy was asleep the first time Kevin saw him, but when he saw him in the months thereafter he wasn’t always: Other times he would be looking out from the stroller with wide blue eyes, entranced by the dance of the plasma screens along the store’s walls. Once, as Kevin returned abandoned shopping carts to their stable in the parking lot, he watched his mother load the boy into a car seat in a red Honda CR-V, singing to him as she did.

The first time Kevin saw the woman’s husband was also the first time he heard the baby cry. The husband had cropped fair hair and wore a pressed golf shirt that strained against his pectorals, and he replied to his wife’s chatter with single syllables. They were heading to Mobile Phones, but as they passed Gaming the baby in the stroller lobbed a small rubber zebra out onto the floor with one fat arm, and then began to wail.

Kevin watched the father’s face tense and seem to pinken as he brought the stroller to a stop. His wife was already up ahead, happily oblivious, and only Kevin was near enough to hear the words of his quiet exhalation.

“Jesus Christ, Ethan,” the father muttered.

Seven months later, not long after Thanksgiving, Kevin would use his employee discount code at Best Buy for the last time, purchasing two iPads. A week after that was when he would stop showing up for work. That was the week he would follow the red Honda CR-V to a Target in a neighboring shopping center, where the mother would leave the boy alone in the cart in the cosmetics aisle to dart back to Women’s Clothing for a pack of athletic socks. It would be nearly Christmastime then, and she’d tell herself that the crowdedness of the store made it safer.

But that was seven months away. This particular afternoon was in springtime, and the boy was in shorts, his fat little legs kicking in anticipation as Kevin kneeled low to pick up the rubber zebra. It had bounced slightly against the linoleum. He looked up at the boy’s father with what the man would undoubtedly receive as a sympathetic smile. Kevin retrieved the zebra, and as he handed it to the boy, he looked keenly at him and leaned close, so that only the child could hear.

“You look like a River,” he said. “And I bet you’d like to go on an adventure.”

This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

By Brady Brickner-Wood

Of the many idioms and bastardized buzzwords putzing around the internet these days, “ascension” has a welcome legibility to it. In the looksmaxxing community, an online subculture of mostly young men attempting to enhance their attractiveness and in turn increase their “sexual market value,” ascension describes the process of lofting into a different stratum of beauty, of elevating from a nobody to a somebody (a subhuman to a Chad, if you will). From the Latin ascensionem, “a rising,” this newfangled application of the abstract noun mostly makes sense: You begin at the bottom of the male hierarchy and, through determined optimization, rise to the top. For anyone even modestly familiar with orthodox Christian teaching, this repurposed concept has obvious resonances with its etymological roots—the Ascension of Jesus, adapted for our absurdist and self-absorbed times.

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How does one ascend, anyway? Lifting weights and eating healthy are sensible starting points, but looksmaxxing influencers often employ more extreme measures to accomplish their goals: smoking methamphetamine to suppress their appetites; injecting black-market steroids and peptides to build muscle; “bonesmashing”—as in smashing the bones in your face with a literal hammer—to chisel their jawlines. If these methods don’t suffice, or fail to address more stubborn genetic defects, cosmetic surgery and limb-lengthening procedures may be necessary. Whatever it takes, it seems, to mutilate yourself to the point of rebirth, to become perfect in the eyes of others.

The looksmaxxing movement purports to provide a scientifically sound and research-driven framework for helping its adherents achieve ascension. There are “objective measurements” to “properly rate an individual’s attractiveness,” per Clavicular, né Braden Peters, one of looksmaxxing’s most visible evangelists of pseudoscientific self-optimization. The measurements he refers to consist of anatomical ratios (the ideal upper arm circumference to waist circumference is 1:1.4, for example) and facial calculations like the desired distance between the pupils and the middle of the lips. By understanding the “mathematics” of attractiveness, a looksmaxxer aims to metamorphose himself from a normie to a True Adam, wielding his newfound sexual irresistibility for social, professional, and perhaps even political gain.

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It’s unclear whether looksmaxxers like Clavicular fully reckon with the religious origins of their new favorite word, or whether, for a self-proclaimed Catholic like him, that lineage is hiding in plain sight. The biblical concept of ascension can most explicitly be traced to the Acts of the Apostles 1:9–11, wherein Jesus, after his resurrection, is beamed up to the sky and vanishes in the clouds. The scene is rich with metaphor: The rising represents a status shift, a transition from earthly life to eternal glory. In attaining immortality through rebirth, Jesus’s ascent to heaven affirms his divine authority, his unequivocal identity as the Son of God. The Ascension narrative also fuels the notion of the Second Coming—that Jesus will return to his disciples the same way he left: in a descent back to earth to fulfill God’s mission. Although theological interpretations of ascension vary depending on one’s penchant for literalism and which verse one analyzes—in the Hebrew Bible, for example, Enoch and Elijah are “taken” by God, presumably upward, into the realm of immortality, sans resurrection—the metaphor of an upward rise to glory has become hardwired into not only our colloquial rhetoric but our fundamental conception of reality.

It should come as no surprise that young, marginalized men lurking on misanthropic forums have repurposed the traditional notion of ascension to fit their own warped ideology. Looksmaxxers, after all, are a natural outgrowth of incels, that cohort of sexually frustrated, or entirely sexless, men who believe society is organized around an attractiveness hierarchy that unfairly advantages women. (You know, because girls can wear makeup and get Botox without fear of societal castigation.) Incel culture is naturally fatalistic: If you are born below a certain beauty threshold, the thinking goes, your pathways to increasing your social status or sexual market value are limited, perhaps even fixed. Looksmaxxing provides salvation for men trapped in a body they feel they were cursed with, offering self-improvement strategies that can fundamentally reshape their experience of being alive. Clavicular describes his own ascension in language that defies any sort of natural process; taking testosterone, steroids, and fat dissolvers is, to him, “a cheat code.” He almost coincidentally reaffirms the theological notion that ascension requires intervention from a higher power. Just as Christians credit God for raising Jesus from the dead and spiriting him up to heaven, looksmaxxers worship pharmaceuticals and aesthetic medicine for their transformative and physiologically distorting properties.

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Because that’s really what we mean when we talk about ascension, isn’t it? Our boundless desire for transformation, to be anything but what we already are, forever climbing and peaking and apexing and mounting and reaching for the thing that may have been within us all along, anyway—or maybe not. Looksmaxxing provides a home for young men hoping to escape their bodies, to evolve into people worthy of being seen. It’s a forgivable impulse, if a misdirected one. Some parts of us, it seems, cannot be improved through steroids and bonesmashing. Some parts of us may be just fine as they are.

Across American and European dance floors, clubgoers are falling in love with a designer drug called 3-MMC. Said to have a softer comedown than Ecstasy and less risk of fentanyl contamination, the synthetic stimulant is “coke without the irritation,” as one 33-year-old former regular on the European gay club circuit told me. “It’s a bit insidious because it’s so lucid.” It’s also cheaper and longer-lasting than cocaine, helpful for marathon-style parties that can stretch 12 to 24 hours, with libido-enhancing effects that make it popular with chemsex enthusiasts. For years, the European clubgoer would use 3-MMC to keep dancing all weekend, sometimes sharing it with the DJs, then keep taking it on weekdays to stay focused during client meetings as a product manager at a major tech company. “When you take it, you don’t feel ‘high,’ ” he explained. “You just feel better, with a little bit of pep in your step. It’s a functional tool, and it’s also very stealth. The outside world can’t really tell that you’re on drugs.”

In an era obsessed with both hedonism and productivity, a substance that enhances the party while also making you more effective at the office feels like the perfect drug. The new synthetics are often quasi-legal because they emerge faster than regulators can keep pace, though bans don’t necessarily decrease their use: 3-MMC has been a controlled substance in the EU since 2022 and in the United States since 2023. Synthetics also usually cost less than classic party drugs because they’re cheaper and easier to produce. As the Brookings Institution noted, “In addition to requiring only a small labor force and minimal territorial control, producing synthetic drugs is more discreet. … Finding drug labs hidden inside or alongside legal drug factories, such as in China and India, is much tougher than locating poppy fields.”

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Like many synthetics, 3-MMC can be traced to a single source: an Israeli-born, Vancouver, Canada–based chemist, often described as the “godfather of legal highs,” who goes by the name Dr. Zee. He claims to have concocted hundreds of new psycho­actives—often with the aid of an algorithm he built, drawing on his background as a mathematician—and tests them on himself before releasing them into the wild. Many remain curiosities consumed only by hardcore psychonauts, but Dr. Zee has had a string of hits with substances that mimic the stimulating, uplifting effects of cathinone, the active ingredient in khat, a flowering shrub that grows throughout East  Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Known as the “leaf of Allah,” khat has been used for centuries for its energizing properties. After years of trying to reach him, I finally got Dr. Zee on the phone.

Dr. Zee began experimenting with synthetic cathinones during a stint working for a drug company in Israel, where he noticed that members of the country’s Yemenite community often chewed khat leaves. Dr. Zee described cathinones to me as “pleasure on tap,” a stimulant class that could sharpen focus while loosening the social hinges. “I found it to be a better alternative to the cocaine circulating in Tel Aviv at the time, so I thought it should be available to everyone,” he said in the documentary King Khat. Known as hagigat, his drug became so popular that, according to the Jewish magazine Tablet, no early-2000s celebration in Tel Aviv was complete without it.

When the Israeli government banned hagigat in 2004, Dr. Zee tweaked the formula and came up with mephedrone, another synthetic cathinone that, despite an odor recalling cat urine (and earning it the nickname Meow Meow), became wildly popular on the U.K. club scene for its euphoric, stimulating qualities. At the time, in the late ’00s, a crackdown in Southeast Asia had choked off the global MDMA supply, so partygoers turned to mephedrone for its warm, MDMA-like high. It did have a moreish quality that could trigger compulsive redosing for some users, but it was also easy to get. Tobacco shops, gas stations, and convenience stores sold synthetic cathinones as “plant food” or “bath salts,” or under stripperish names like Ivory Wave, Vanilla Sky, and Bliss. Mephedrone could even be purchased online from labs in China. “It was insane,” a British raver friend told me. “You could order shitloads of it online and deliver it to your mum’s house.” Mephedrone’s ubiquity prompted sensationalist media reports that falsely linked bath salts to grisly crimes, including cannibalism, penis mutilation, and the killing of a pygmy goat. After police crackdowns, the U.K. and the EU banned it in 2010, and the U.S. followed in 2011, paving the way for 3-MMC.

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A close cousin to mephedrone, 3-MMC has a speedier drive and less of a fuzzy loved-up feeling. Dr. Zee told me he took 3-MMC almost every day for 10 years. In a patent application, he wrote that the drug seemed to encourage “deeper self-disclosure [and the] ability to produce a sense of calming empowerment” that allows users to creatively reframe undesirable thought patterns while fostering a “deeply felt sense of accomplishment.” The relaxed, chatty lucidity that 3-MMC brings users translates well not only to the club and office but also to therapeutic contexts. In “On 3-MMC: A Cathinone I Have Come to Know and Love,” an article published in the American journal Anthropology of Consciousness, Carmen Ostrander, a therapist also based in Vancouver, Canada, observes that the drug can act as a sort of truth serum: “Stories come tumbling out, not because you can’t stop talking about yourself, but from an earnest yearning to share authentically and be received, while simultaneously promoting deeper listening and presence.”

Like MDMA, 3-MMC’s non-recreational potential has caught the attention of the pharmaceutical industry. Definium Therapeutics is working on 3-MMC as a tool for psychotherapy and a treatment for PTSD.  Another company, Period Pill, is researching a 3-MMC-based drug to treat menstrual cramps, PMS, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. In a phase 1 study recently published in Psychopharmacology, Period Pill found that low to moderate doses of the drug offered pain relief and mood enhancements. Today’s party drug is tomorrow’s pharmaceutical panacea.

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Despite the enthusiasm of therapists and Big Pharma, 3-MMC has one potentially fatal flaw: Like hagigat and mephedrone, it can be addictive. The club kids with ruined sinus cavities and nose scabs can attest to this. Yet 3-MMC’s rise seems unstoppable. Perhaps it will turn out to be like MDMA, which saw its recreational market explode after being banned. So far, 3-MMC’s supply chains, which trace back to industrial labs in China and India, have held steady. With its irresistible mix of pleasure and productivity, 3-MMC might just be the drug for our time.

This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

By J.R. Patterson

Fifteen years ago, I took a small room at a shabby hotel in an unremarkable Mexican town. I was 23 and traveling as a way to elude responsibility. My life ambitions were vague, and I still made most of my choices in the lazy pursuit of sexual gratification. Not knowing anyone, I began visiting a nearby Aztec pyramid, a mound of stone on a bluff over the town partially retaken by jungle, where the local youth gathered at sunset to drink beer and gossip.

That’s where I first saw her, using a small knife to score the gnarled bark of a tree. Milky sap spilled out, gathering in slow tears along the cuts she’d made. A globule purled onto her hand, and as she turned to me, she raised her fingers to her lips and sucked it off. She wore a thin halter top and a loose, unstructured skirt with a dirty hem that brushed her bare ankles. Her skin was a deep, burnished color, like the earth after rain.

“Copal,” she told me. “I’m a bruja. A witch.” I laughed, but her fierce expression stopped me short. I knew nothing about brujería—the folk tradition of healing and spiritual cleansing practiced throughout Latin America—but her strangeness only heightened my desire to get close to her. As she bent to open a small sack of resinous crystals made from hardened sap, I glimpsed her loose breasts. “Copal,” she said again. “I burn it as part of limpias. Cleanings.”

“What do you clean?” I asked.

“Bad spirits,” she replied. “Evil thoughts. I also grant wishes. And make amarres. Love spells.”

She was older than me, perhaps in her mid-30s. Her shaggy black hair was touched with streaks of blue. I noticed a bird’s feather in it and reached to pluck it out. Her hand, sticky with sap and warmed by the afternoon sun, met mine. “I feel that you were brought here,” she said. “The wind brought you. But you need a limpia. Come to my house. I will clean you.”

When I arrived the next day at the whitewashed adobe box where she lived, I found her in the same top and grubby skirt. She led me into a walled garden where she had placed objects—bones, jars, and painted stones—among the thicket of trees and ferns, vines, and flowers.

“I knew you would come,” she said, seating me in a small chair. “I asked for it. But first, you must be made clean.” She lit a piece of copal and let it smolder, guiding its white plume toward me with a sheaf of feathers. I breathed its medicinal, faintly sweet scent as she circled me, murmuring under her breath. After a few revolutions, she leaned her hard torso against my body. “Completo,” she said. “Do you feel better?” I told her I felt much improved, and she tilted her head toward the house.

Moving from the brightness of the garden to the cool darkness inside rendered me momentarily blind. I felt her touch on my back and turned, trying to distinguish her silhouette from the shadows of the room. Using one hand, she unknotted her straps, then cupped her full breasts, as if offering the dark nipples. I pulled her to me, smelling sweat and smoke on her, and reached for her velvet grain. She sighed, then shimmied out of her skirt and lay on the bed. I hopped out of my own clothes and lay beside her, conscious of how much paler my skin was than hers.

I’d come prepared, but when she saw me reach for the foil packet in my pants pocket, she told me, “No, no. Come down, come here.” I ignored her and slipped the condom on. As we moved and breathed against each other, a dog barked outside, and another answered. When we were done, I tugged off the sheath and tossed it to the floor. Immediately, she rose to scoop it up.

“I take it to the garden,” she said. “It will help everything grow. It’s the best of you.” Looking at the slick plastic wad in her hand, I hoped she was wrong. When she returned a moment later, she asked me to stay. In my postcoital lassitude, I assented.

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The night extended into days. I checked out of my hotel, happy to live without expenses. We developed a little domestic routine—eating her soup, lounging in her garden, walking in the hills to collect copal and seeds and plants for the ceremonies I watched her perform for other clients. And we returned frequently to her love-stained bed. When we finished, she always collected the latex-bagged ejaculate—my “copal,” she began calling it—to bring to the garden. Once, I went looking for the place where she left it and exposed a wasp’s nest. The insects stung my face, my arms, my bare back. The bruja came out of the kitchen holding a clay tureen of soup, smiling as I swatted frantically.

The stings healed, but my nether regions were increasingly tender from our constant lovemaking, which I began to worry was less about pleasure-seeking and more about her controlling me. I felt like a curio to her clientele, who cast me knowing glances, as if I were a pet she dragged around and stroked. She kept me close, rarely letting me out of her sight. The dirty sheets, the soups, the ceremonies, her obsession with collecting my seed—it had all begun to make me feel like a prisoner. One morning, when she rolled on top of me, I demurred.

“Not happy?” she asked. “Gringos love Mexico. Be happy here. You stay.”

Forever  was the unspoken last word. I went out to the garden but, after a few steps, felt a sharp pain shoot through my foot, as if I’d stepped on a nail. A pale scorpion scuttled into a litter of leaves. The bruja led me back to the bed, my foot numb and dragging like a club, and I lay there surrounded by the stale aroma of our sex. “Love, love,” she said, laying a damp rag across my forehead, securing the shutters, and closing the door. I went in and out of consciousness, wracked by spasms, breathlessness, and vomiting. There were soup spoons, sponges, and water trickling into my mouth. Eventually I awoke to find her perched on the edge of the bed.

“The limpia worked,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

A wave of fear broke over me as I lay there, cold and naked. “I want to go home,” I said in a small voice, like the last leaf falling off a tree.

“You are home,” she said.

I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep. The next time I woke, I felt for the first time that I could stand. I dressed shakily and found her in the garden, fussing with trinkets.

“You are better,” she said. “Have some food.”

I asked if she’d taken a pregnancy test.

“It’s not needed,” she said. “I can feel it.”

But I persisted, so we went to the local farmacia, where I bought three kits from a woman who wouldn’t look me in the eye. I waited on the bench outside a nearby cantina, feeling nauseated, while the bruja went in to use the bathroom. When she emerged, looking despondent, I snatched the tests from her hand: negative, negative, negative.

“You need another limpia,” she said. “Vamos,” she said. “We go back.”

“I feel ill,” I told her. I reached into my pocket, where I found only my passport and a small amount of money. Telling her I was thirsty, I handed her a bill and asked if she’d go back to buy me some water. As soon as the door banged shut, I began running until I reached the bus station. Without the bag I’d abandoned at the adobe house, I felt like an evacuee from a natural disaster. Shivering as I rode through the darkened Mexican landscape that night, I thought about the verdant chaos of the bruja’s garden and, under the leaves, the grasping pincers and poison tails.

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This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

This story begins in an Eataly. Amid the rows of jarred syrupy cherries and laughably priced pastas, I meet Adam. Adam is a bachelor. He is 34 and the CEO of an industrial tech company. He lives alone in the West Village. He votes Democrat. He reads books and writes in a journal. He meditates. He is good-looking and six feet tall.

Dating, Adam tells me, is like dipping one’s toe into the water to gauge the temperature and having one’s foot ripped off by the force of the current. Which is to say, maybe he is not that good at it, maybe it is not even all that pleasant, but he is, at least, in demand. Very in demand.

Such is the condition of the New York City bachelor. Is it unfair or dishonest to make sweeping claims about the state of American masculinity and focus my sample exclusively on the men of the United States’ largest metropolitan area? Perhaps so. But it is here, one could argue, that the 20th-century ideal of the bachelor was cemented: the kind of guy who wears a suit to work most days, owns plenty of leather furniture in his high-rise apartment, and has enough disposable income to buy, well, whatever the hell he pleases. The real defining characteristic of New York City as a place of romantic optimism for the bachelor is its gender ratio, which, anecdotally, skews two single women to every single man in several neighborhoods. As Lana Li, a writer and data scientist, explained in a March 2025 post on her Substack, Love Me like a Robot, using data from the American Community Survey, there are 20,000 more unmarried, college-educated women than men in Manhattan. The result for men, she writes, is “an embarrassment of riches,” making New York “the Valhalla of young, single men.”

The average bachelor today, however, might relate more to the Spartan tradition of classical antiquity in which unmarried men were forced to march naked through the streets in winter singing songs of self-ridicule, or the festival in which married Spartan women could drag single men around an altar and humiliate them with thrashings. Every headline about the state of the young male today suggests the spiritual equivalent of such a fate. Young men are increasingly underperforming their female peers in educational attainment and income. They are more likely to live at home with their parents, and a growing chunk of them are not dating at all and never have. Many of them are not only unemployed but are also not even looking for a job. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among men ages 25 to 34. Unintentional injuries, including drug overdoses, are the first.

But not all hope is lost. Truly. Average men with jobs and friendships and desire to date exist. And they’re relatively happy. Maybe that does not sound like you now. Maybe you are a young man, beginning what should be a period of prosperity in your life at a time of economic and political upheaval. Maybe it seems like you came in at the very end of something. You’re not wrong at all to feel that way, but let one thing be known: You, too, can find the life you want.

Elliot, 38, is another guy doing well. He has his own apartment and a full-time job at a prominent nonprofit. Still, he is sure he’d find romantic success with less.

“What I’ve told my friends, who are also bachelors, is that if you shower and are a decent person, if you have a job, if you have a place, a bed frame—the standard is so low and so easy to meet, it’s really sad and pathetic if someone feels like they’re lonely outside of their own choice,” he says.

Now maybe if you’re of a different generation, 34 and 38 sound a bit old for bachelorhood. And indeed, historically, it somewhat is. The earliest mentions of bacheler date to the late 13th century, when it meant a knight with no vassals, followed shortly by its appearance in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in about 1386. There, Chaucer introduced a character known as the Squire. He is described as the son of a knight, about 20 years in age, “with lokkes crulle as they were leyd in presse,” locks so perfectly curled it looks as though he wore them in curlers. He is of moderate height, agile and strong, and knows how to compose songs, draw, and write. He is courteous and humble. He is so full of love and life in hopes of standing “in his lady’s good graces” that he barely sleeps at night. He’d probably love an Eataly.

For centuries, the term bachelor held this juvenile, entry-level positioning of a young man without much to show on his own. A bachelor’s degree, for example, was first awarded to young scholars, junior guild members, and monks eligible to continue on to higher education after their first round of studies. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that bachelor­hood took on a connotation of romantic eligibility. From the 1800s onward, to be an eligible bachelor meant that you were not only single but also of solid-enough financial standing to properly support a wife and family.

From there bachelorhood became something of an aspiration—one, it could be argued, that serves as the ideological foundation of this very magazine. You imagine a man in his warm, expansive apartment overlooking the city, placing the needle on a record as he pours himself another scotch. Each weekend, a new woman joins him in the conversation pit. In September 1956, Playboy commissioned a multipart illustrative series on the idealized “penthouse apartment of the urban bachelor—a man who enjoys good living, a sophisticated connoisseur of the lively arts of food and drink and congenial companions of both sexes.” His domain includes a dining room larger than the average studio apartment.

In the contemporary context, Adam might sound like an outlier. Elliot, with his Manhattan apartment and principled job, might too. But there are also guys like Jon, 29, who bartends in Greenwich Village and lives with roommates in Astoria, fitting the profile of a single guy doing just fine.

Jon is not on any dating apps. Being a bartender in a big city where women like to drink, you don’t really need them. He’s not quite bringing home the women from work, though he’s had some offers, but being a bartender begets meeting other bartenders. Many of the people he hangs out with, platonically or otherwise, are in the service industry themselves.

Jon has always had somewhat of a knack for talking to girls in person, perhaps the same knack that makes him a good candidate for bartending. From his first nights out at 21, he was always the most gregarious of his group.

“I remember going out with friends and thinking, ‘This is gonna be fun. We’ll get to talk with people.’ But being around my friends who were more shy, it was very eye-opening for me. One night we got to this bar, and there’s like a bunch of people dancing. I saw this one beautiful girl, and I’m like, ‘I’m gonna go dance with her. Why not?’ And all of my friends said, ‘Yeah, there’s no way.’ ” But their doubt only motivated him. “I said to her, ‘I can’t believe you were dancing alone. That’s so crazy.’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, people asked me, but you’re the one that made me feel no pressure.’ It was just super easy.”

For Jon, approaching women is as simple as being casual and respectful. It’s something that takes practice and something he has indeed failed at too. “I’ve totally bombed so bad before,” he says. “I have a big rule now: Never approach a girl reading a book at a bar. I am never ever doing that ever again.”

On a recent Friday evening, I visit Jon on his shift at & Son, a bar and steakhouse that makes its employees wear suspenders. After work, Jon joins me at a nearby bar popular with fellow bartenders. There, he is greeted and hugged by multiple women. It occurs to me that it might look like I’m his date and I am therefore probably cockblocking him. As we chat, Jon reiterates to me that his strategy for meeting women and being social is relatively simple: You just keep working it. You just stop being weird. You just keep asking questions. All this, he says, he has learned mostly from his job. “People really want to talk about themselves, and it’s really hard to listen,” says Jon. He wins in this world by being someone willing to listen.

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Politics is, for better or worse, a defining factor in the fuckability of the single young man today. At minimum, showing allegiance to causes of the Left—of which the largest share of young women, 40 percent, are part—helps the case, especially in places like New York. For Elliot, whose app profiles list his workplace as the aforementioned high-profile progressive nonprofit, demonstrating his politics is a cinch. “Is it virtue signaling if it’s true?” he asks of having markers like the Palestinian flag or ACAB in one’s dating app bio. He finds that identifying his politics to women helps them feel safer. “If you can communicate with someone that you’re not a piece of shit, that actually goes a long way when the standards are so low for how dudes present themselves,” he says. Elliot often dates upwards of seven people at a time, keeping them organized with a full Google calendar.

There are times when juggling everyone has gotten him into trouble, say, from a toothbrush left behind or a condom wrapper on the floor. But for the moments of remembering whose sister just got a new job or which movie he saw with which woman on which weekend, he’s got one easy trick.

“How do you get out of it? You just go, ‘Oh sorry, I’m confused.’ Honestly, it usually works out pretty well.”

“I find it to not be difficult,” he says. “What I do find difficult is expectations. If things are moving quickly and I realize that this person isn’t an actual potential lifelong match, then that can get annoying and tricky. Sometimes a person will get to that point very quickly—one week in, two weeks in, two months, whatever it is. There’s this funny balance where you’re open and honest, but you’re also having ridiculously silly conversations early on, like ‘Hey,’ the first date, ‘what are we, what are your expectations, do you want to get married tomorrow?’ ”

For all his dating around, Elliot does have a desire to find something serious. “My wiring lends itself toward wanting monogamy,” he says. Even so, he is happy to accommodate far less serious dynamics, at least temporarily.

I ask him to walk me through his weekend plans: “On Friday, I’m seeing an off-Broadway play with a person I’ve been dating,” a different person than he is going on a date with after we finish our conversation, though he will be seeing her again on Saturday. “On Sunday, I’m seeing someone who has made it clear they are emotionally not available, and it’s sex only.”

OK, OK, so these guys are relatively well liked by women and go on dates and have plenty of friends. Let’s address the real question: What are their sex lives actually like?

Whether a bachelor is looking to settle down or remain single in perpetuity, the entire identity is really more of a polite way of saying a guy is fuckable. The hygiene routine, the nice apartment, the asking others questions about themselves—it would all be for naught if it didn’t yield the belief that sex is more tangible for it. And, yeah, of course it all has other benefits, but there’s no shame in the reality that people, especially young men, do certain things and act certain ways in order to potentially have more sex. That is, ultimately, what a bachelor is.

So, yes, Adam, Elliot, and Jon are all having sex with someone regularly. Elliot is likely having the most, at least in good part because he is actively pursuing it the most. He’s on Feeld, where his profile states an interest in “brats” and light BDSM leanings. Jon, by his own admission, is largely still figuring himself out post-breakup. Sex happens but is not the priority. Adam, meanwhile, is the most coy: He is having enough sex that he doesn’t want to speak much of it. At one point, I press him. “I’ll put it this way: I’m getting everything I want out of my sex life,” he says.

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It often feels impossible to analyze the circumstances of contemporary dating without applying economic terms too. Adam does so often. Even the term roster, which he loathes, carries its own connotations of an investment portfolio.

“We just keep using market analogs,” he says to me at one point in our conversation. “It’s a bit like betting on a stock.”

He himself, I must note, does not view women in this way. Rather, he believes that some women might view him as the stock. And he is correct in his understanding of that dynamic.

The comparison was most apt in his 20s. He used to have long hair, living in San Francisco as an engineer for an app you almost definitely have on your phone. At the time, he had a long-distance girlfriend who begged him to cut his shoulder-length locks. When she met him at the airport to move in with him and saw that he hadn’t cut his hair, she cried.

When they eventually went to visit her family in Chicago, he decided it was finally time to make the chop. As he entered her family home, freshly barbered, he recalls her father, the CEO of a publicly traded company, saying to her, “That’s what I told you. Buy low, sell high.”

“He was speaking market logic,” Adam explains, “implying that she used market arbitrage by finding me with long hair, when I looked less attractive, and then making me get a haircut, but she was actually right. If you do put this in the piece, make sure that I state clearly that I think she was correct. I looked bad with long hair, and she was totally correct.”

Today, though, Adam is indeed something of a catch. He looks a bit like Ron Livingston, of Office Space and the infamous Post-it note breakup with Carrie Bradshaw, and (keeping with the Sex and the City theme) has a terrace that looks out over Sarah Jessica Parker’s. Does he have a roster? At least not one he’d admit to. That would not be dignified.

During our conversation, he pulls out a notebook filled with thoughts about what it really even means to be a bachelor. One specific note he highlights: “Imagine an actually cultivated person talking about rosters or situationships.” Language, for Adam, is critical. No crass jokes. No edgelord humor. Is this the language of a person trying to foster a beautiful life? At your wedding, do you want this to be the first story of you two meeting? These are the questions he believes the prospective bachelor should be considering. Adam has also thought a lot about the definition of a bachelor. He is strict on the idea that a bachelor has never been married, in contrast to our colloquial usage with shows like The Golden Bachelor, featuring divorced and widowed men, and in contrast to Elliot, who has been married and amicably divorced once. But the bachelor is, to Adam, nevertheless a term in relation to marriage: The idea is that a bachelor will one day be married. And while he does want this someday, maybe even sooner than later, he’s again cautious of what this verbiage evokes.

His only hesitancy on marriage, he says, isn’t marriage itself but the way wanting it can sound. There’s an aggressiveness, he feels, in announcing that you are “gunning” to date someone. And if he really analyzed his resistance, it comes down to this: The energy of saying out loud that you’re looking for someone right now can be “kind of wretched.”

He imagines the opposite of himself: someone grinding on the apps, four dates a week. That’s not him. He’s not looking for a girlfriend, and there’s a certain “frenetic puppiness” to the search that he’s pretty sure he doesn’t embody. Yet he does want to land in a relationship that’s ultimately serious: in love, married, maybe a family. He once thought he’d have all this by the time his parents did, at 35. As that age rapidly approaches, though, he’s accepted that the horizon may indeed be a bit more distant. There’s a good way to go about achieving that status, he says, and a bad one. Dwelling too much on age is, for him, a bad one.

Perhaps here is a good place to mention that Adam is becoming a practitioner of Zen Buddhism.

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“I don’t know if I’m the ideal bachelor,” he tells me as he combs through his notes, reflecting on why he agreed to let me interview him. “It’s not something I’ve necessarily aspired to in my life, to be a bachelor at 34. It actually kind of implies a set of relationship failures, but I think when you told me about this piece, my thinking about it was that there is this cultural thread of a bachelor in American society.”

Adam wants to think about what it means to be a bachelor, just as I do, in order to consider what good the role might offer young men today: “If we pick up that thread and men try and cultivate themselves in a nontransactional way, not thinking about their marketplace value but as human beings, we can get back to a dating dynamic that’s more romantic, and I think that’s a really powerful concept.”

Not just powerful, he says, but masculine. Healthy and masculine.

Adam likes to imagine young men having their A Summer’s Tale moment, referring to the 1996 Éric Rohmer movie about a young man who begins his summer going after a girl who isn’t interested in him—before finding himself chased by several others.

You might spend your 20s confused, desperate, and awkward, but that’s OK. The point, Adam says, is to continue to cultivate yourself: to find the things you genuinely care about, to respect both yourself and others. At some point, maybe not until a man reaches his late 20s or early 30s, the pieces will fall into place. “I think any guy—no matter how you look, no matter how you are—if you take care of yourself, a lot of men can have their A Summer’s Tale moment,” Adam says.

Adam wants other men to know they can have what he has, regardless of the CEO title or $7,500-a-month apartment in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the world. If one can cultivate an eye for beauty and a sense of confidence in oneself and romance, he says, “they might just be a perfect bachelor. They might even be a perfect bachelor just to one person.”

And, yeah, being in New York might help. But a life of hobbies, interesting people, and self-worth can be grown nearly anywhere in this country. It’s just a matter of choosing to do so. Take a deep breath. Turn off the manosphere podcast. You’ve got time.

Looking for Cara Delevingne’s full cover story? It’s available to subscribers only—become a member to read the full, extended version (and see her full pictorial) here.

Cara Delevingne sits at the center of several dichotomies: former teen model making sense of herself in adulthood, sober and a rockstar, and now, out as a lesbian and on the cover of Playboy. Complicated? Maybe. But Delevingne, our Summer 2026 cover star, is comfortable in these contrasts. And it helps, of course, to have her speaking with , America’s preeminent novelist of complicated women.

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The My Year of Rest and Relaxation author and Delevingne carry a similar torch of the zillennial zeitgeist, informing the taste of an entire generation of Tumblr-bred people. If Delevingne was the image, Moshfegh has come to embody the voice. But for Delevingne, in particular, what it means to be the image is a project in motion. And with the release of her two debut singles this year, she, too, is coming to embody a voice of her own.

In early June, Moshfegh joined Delevingne at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever in Los Angeles on her first multi-city headline tour, discussing creative control over one’s own image, the relationship between spirituality and sobriety, and how sexuality is woven between it all.

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As she told Moshfegh, “Sex is a language… and your own sexuality, what turns you on, is like a beautiful dance you play with yourself. So many people spend so much more time on how they want to be perceived by others, and not their own sexual relationship with themselves—loving yourself and turning yourself on. It’s fun when you can discover that.”

As our Summer 2026 cover star, Delevingne is proving that you can simultaneously be and do several things at once. You can enjoy your sexuality for yourself and still let others see it, you can be openly queer on the cover of what Moshfegh calls “an American institution of heterosexual fantasy,” you can navigate sobriety and still be open to all of the possibilities of creative expression. You can reinvent yourself whenever you want. “I don’t love the rules,” Delevingne told Moshfegh. “I like doing things differently.”

— , Senior Editor

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A couple days after I spoke with iconic essayist David Sedaris about his new book, The Land and Its People, a postcard—the first I’ve received in maybe 20 years—arrived from him in the mail. It was a stylish piece of John Derian stationary, one side of which bore an illustration of mushrooms while on the other he thanked me for the chat and provided an unsolicited recommendation for a shop in my city that he described as “not the best...but they have nice things.”

The king of wry and often mentioned as peer to other great essayists and humorists of the past 40 years, Sedaris is unparalleled in many realms, including finding amusement in the most improbable of scenarios—like, say, a “not the best” store in a city that’s not his own. In The Land and Its People, he also finds it in purchasing underwear while reflecting on his father’s death. In his disdain at having to care for his partner following surgery. In Duolingo and throat cancer. In strategizing how to best eat a truck tire.

After the release of his latest essay collection, Playboy caught up with Sedaris to run through those unlikely joys.

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One of your reviewers said that in your new book, the world seems weirder to you than ever. Would you agree with that? Does the world seem weirder to you?

I think so. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think the world probably seems weirder to a lot of people. The majority of people, I would think. Even if you set aside politics. I mean, five years ago, if you were talking about AI, nobody would know what you were talking about.

What is the hardest thing about writing about your own life?

Gosh, the hardest thing about writing about my own life is I don’t think that I’m interesting, you know? But I have to be interesting for someone to turn the page. So I suppose it’s believing that I’m… on some level, interesting.

What’s the hardest thing about writing about people who are close to you? Because you can be pretty, kind of, gloves-off sometimes.

My stories would be so much richer if I could include certain information that I just can’t include, because it would hurt people’s feelings, or it would expose them. So often I think of what it would be like if we were living in one of those science fiction movies where everybody was dead. Everybody died except me. I would get so much good writing done.

You write in this book about meeting Pope Francis. What was the strangest thing about meeting the Pope?

Meeting Chris Rock. Chris Rock, the night before I met the Pope, there was a dinner. Chris Rock was there at the dinner, and that left me tongue-tied and terribly, terribly impressed—much more than meeting the Pope. I couldn’t believe I was in a room with Chris Rock.

That doesn’t say much for the Pope’s entertainment skills.

No. I mean, I could believe I was in a room with the Pope, but I couldn’t believe I was in a room with Chris Rock.

A lot of your stories involve travel. What have been some of your favorite and least favorite places to visit?

Best place visited… well, Japan. I go to Japan every other year. I go to Tokyo, and that’s just the best place. The worst place was probably… golly. The worst place I’ve visited. Tanzania, probably. It was just really hot and humid and, you know, everybody was just trying to rip you off. Egypt was pretty bad, too. Like in Egypt, everybody’s running a game, you know? And it’s just exhausting. It’s certainly not boring, but it’s really tiring.

In one of your new stories, you talk about learning that your father had lied to you over a series of many years. How did it feel to realize that someone so close to you had lied to you for so long?

I wasn’t surprised, you know what I mean? Like, I knew it was within him to do everything that he did. I could never respond, “I can’t believe you did that.” I could never honestly say that, because I could believe he did everything that he did. What was embarrassing was that I wrote him thank-you letters every year, and I was the only one to do that, and he accepted them. Like, he wanted the thank-you letter, he just didn’t want to give me anything to thank him for.

You’re a comedic writer, but you also deal with some heavy subjects. What’s the hardest thing about writing about these serious things, like grief and loss?

I think it’s probably avoiding clichés and not being sentimental. I think those are the hardest bits. Did you ever read Calvin Trillin? He wrote for years about his wife, Alice, right? She was like, the reasonable one in their relationship, and he wrote about her in book after book, and then she died, and he wrote a book about her dying. And I so admire it, and I read it every year. It’s not sentimental. At no point does he resort to any cliché you’ve ever heard about death. And I just admire him so much for that. The book is good to read just as a masterclass on how to avoid that.

This is your 13th collection. Is there one essay or story over all the years that stands out as your personal favorite?

Gee, I think that changes a lot. I mean, there was an anthology that came out maybe 15 years ago, and it was called This Is My Best. And at that point, I put an essay in there that was from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim called “Repeat After Me.” And now, if I were to read “Repeat After Me,” I’d be like, oh my God, I can’t believe I did this. So now I would say “H.C. Goodyear,” which is in my latest book, and it’s a story about my friendship with Don Erickson. It’s so hard to write about friendship, but I think I really managed to pull it off. And when I read it out loud—because I’m on this book tour and I often read it—I found two sentences I would cut. But other than that, I feel like I’d be really surprised if I ever wrote anything better than that in my life. I’m already tired of it. You know, I mean, I read it on stage probably 50 times. Ten years from now, I’ll probably read it and be like, ugh, my God, that thing is so bad.

On that note, is there one story or book that you would strike from the record if you could?

Oh, sure. Probably the book Naked, which was my second book. I would strike that from the record. It’s just overwritten. It’s somebody who’s trying too hard, and somebody who’s elbowing you in the ribs. It’s embarrassing. And everything in there is twice as long as it needs to be.

There have been debates over the factuality of certain aspects of your books over the years. When you’re writing about one’s own life, how close should a writer stick to the facts?

As closely as possible. There are people who say you should not be able to write about any time that you’re alone because there’s no one to back it up. Now, we can’t go that far, you know? I mean, when you write for The New Yorker, everything is fact-checked. Like, everything, everything, everything, everything, everything. So I don’t know what else I can do to please people.

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Have you ever gotten a negative review that you thought nailed it?

I never read reviews. I don’t think it’s right to read the good ones and not the bad ones.

You don’t read the good ones either?

No.

You’ve expressed a lot of displeasure with the political situation over the past decade. What do you think should be done now?

I think everybody should go to the polls during the midterm, and I think they should vote, and I mean everybody. I blame everything on people who didn’t vote in the last election. People who sat that out for whatever bullshit reason. More than doing something about Trump, something needs to be done about people who sit at home and sit it out, and either feel like it’s rigged, or feel like their vote doesn’t make a difference. I’ve always felt like it’s the least you can do.

Your humor tends to be pretty absurdist. What’s it like to be an absurdist in the era of Trump?

It always just means you’re having a heyday, you know what I mean? It’s just being handed right to you every single day. If you’re looking for absurd…I mean, there are times when you have to really hunt for something, and then there are times when all you have to do is open the newspaper, and this is just one of those times. All you gotta do is open the newspaper.

Is there anything from the news this last year that you thought was particularly hilarious?

Oh, yeah, tons of things. Let’s see… gosh, I mean, the thing is, I was listening to some podcast the other day, and they were talking about things that Trump had done only like four months ago that we’ve completely forgotten about. Sending the National Guard into different cities, you know? I was listening to this podcast, and I thought, oh, right! I would have forgotten all about that. So much has happened, I would have forgotten all about it.

One thing that’s interesting to me in the paper today that I was all caught up in—it’s this guy who’s running for office in Oregon. Or is he just trying to pass a bill? That would make animal cruelty of any kind illegal, so you wouldn’t be able to spray for pests and you wouldn’t be able to hunt or fish. And the article was just saying how Republicans are seizing on this and saying, see, this is how crazy Democrats are. They want to take away your right to hunt and fish. But the guy who’s doing it is not registered with either party, right? So he’s not a Democrat, but then it doesn’t make sense, because he’ll still be painted as one.

You take swipes at people and ideas across the political spectrum. What do you think of the Democrats?

I just get exhausted by the virtue signaling and purity tests. I just find all of that exhausting, and I feel like it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. And I just feel like it’s really important to turn away from that. I mean, isn’t everyone tired of that? The scolding, and the lunacy of renaming schools and concentrating on shit that just doesn’t matter to most people. I mean, I hate the far right and the far left. I hate everybody.

You know Stephen Colbert. What do you think of his show being cancelled and the attacks on Kimmel?

Even though networks can make the case that shows like that lose a lot of money, I don’t think we have any reason to believe them when they say that’s why they’re taking the shows off the air. It seems the shows are disappearing because Donald Trump doesn’t like them, because he doesn’t like being made fun of. And I think it’s kind of naive on his part. You know, the same way that people will ban a book. Like, a school will ban a book, but no kid is getting the idea to transition from a book, you know? It’s such a sweet idea that kids are going to the library and getting their ideas from books. They’re not. They’re getting their ideas from TikTok. And nobody’s watching TV. Very few people watch TV. They watch clips of something on YouTube, but they’re not turning on the TV and running to sit in front of it the way that Donald Trump is. So it’s naive on his part to think that he could ever silence all criticism of him, because hating him is a nice industry. It’s a money-making industry.

Getting back to you, does being funny and having to be “on” all the time ever get tiring?

When I go on a book tour, a lecture tour, that doesn’t bother me any. If you’re around people and it’s your job to entertain them, I do. I can turn it off as easily as I turn it on. But I think it’s called for. If I’m signing books and someone comes up to get a book signed, I completely need to be on, and I completely need to be engaged, and I completely need to be focused on them. They have every right to expect that, and if I don’t deliver that, then I feel like I failed in a really fundamental way.

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You’ve done a lot of tours and interviews over the years. Is there any question that you can’t stand?

Yeah. “Are you still picking up trash?” Because I wrote about picking up trash, and I guess the reason it bothers me is, of course I’m still doing it. Do you know what I mean? Like, of course I am. Like, “Are you still walking ten miles?” Of course I am. Unless I’m in a wheelchair—unless you see me in a wheelchair—I’m doing those things. It’s often what people say, like, “Did you pick up any trash in Memphis today?” I just hate that question. So sometimes when people ask, “Are you still picking up trash?”, I’ll just say, “No, I’m a Capricorn,” and then next question.

You wrote about learning to appreciate being naked 30 years ago. Now, three decades on, how do you feel about being naked?

Oh, the same way I felt before I went. I mean, I don’t even like to be naked in the bathtub, if I can help it. You know, I’m completely uncomfortable being naked. I like to be fully dressed at all times. It didn’t work in the long term. You know, just for the time that I was there, it came to work. I stopped noticing other people’s nudity, which meant that I had stopped noticing my own.

Do you have any advice for the young men of today?

Gosh. It’s just tired, old advice, but it’s: get off your phone. I’m the only one paying attention anymore, and all I see are people looking at their phones, so I need something better to notice when I’m noticing things. I worry that it’s just an old-person answer, but I don’t know, I’m 69, so what can I do?

Playboy has always done the Fourth of July right. In our July 1976 issue celebrating America’s 200th birthday, we paired an ode to the hot dog with some of the most incisive anti-war writing of the 20th century. But of course, our favorite way to honor this nation is to highlight the people that make it. The women that have appeared in Playboy aren’t just icons of beauty, but of freedom of speech and freedom of sexuality. With this in mind, we’ve put together some of our favorite images showing off our flag. For the uncensored versions, as well as the full pictorials they come from, you can become a member.

Happy 4th, everyone.

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This intimate pictorial appeared in our Spring 2026 issue—if you missed it, you can still access the entire issue as well as our complete archive dating back to 1953 here. Ready for the next one? It hits newsstands July 28.

“It’s always a dance between the subject and me.” For Close Contact, South African photographer Betina du Toit—based in New York and known for intimate, stripped-back imagery—trained her lens on model Julia Campbell-Gillies in a series of close-range images that isolate skin, faces, and bodies in quiet, sensory detail, successfully capturing what she calls “moments of sensuality, like snippets from a movie scene.”

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Don’t bother to point and click. Just when technology threatened to turn shock and gross-out humor into a private affair, MTV throws Jackass in our faces. The cable network’s top-rated show entrances adolescents and enrages parents the old-fashioned way, with idiotic stunts, inane pranks and hidden-camera segments. The Jackass recipe is concocted from effluvia and entrails, plus the occasional barbecue featuring unfilleted human sprawled across the grill. OK—there’s a fire-retardant suit between him and the meat and the charcoal.

Jackass, obviously not fare for the faint of heart or stomach, is presided over by Johnny Knoxville (his driver’s license identifies him as P.J. Clapp), who swears, “This is my attempt to emulate my father.” The senior Clapp motivated employees of his Tennessee tire business with mock gunfights and taught his toddler son to welcome customers with a slug to the crotch.

Clapp fils is not sure he lives up to the old man’s expectations. Not that he isn’t trying. Knoxville was born to the prank, but his detour from a career selling radials took a few turns. He recalls an uncompleted novel, a checkered stint in journalism (he filed reports from the road that were actually written on his back porch), an acting course marked incomplete and hanging out with skateboarding pals. Lucky for him, Knoxville let his inner Dad blossom: He tested self-defense equipment on himself, he sat in a portable toilet that was then overturned by a forklift. He strapped on an artificial penis for a day, and so forth. Friends with video cameras faithfully recorded these antics, which caught the attention of director Spike Jonze. Jonze shaped the tapes into a cassette that duly impressed the suits at MTV. The corporate decision to augment tame fare such as Total Request Live and The Real World with Jackass was a no-brainer—in the virtual sense of the term. Knoxville and his highly skilled troupe of jackasses premiered on the network last fall and the show has been enthusiastically renewed.

Contributing Editor Warren Kalbacker caught up with Knoxville in the lush farm country of southeastern Pennsylvania. “I had been warned that he’d tried his hand at bovine gynecology that afternoon,” Kalbacker reports. “And I know what a barnyard smells like. So I was delighted to meet a fastidiously groomed man.”

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PLAYBOY: Your real name is P.J. Clapp. The Johnny Knoxville moniker suggests that you come from Tennessee.

KNOXVILLE: South Knoxville. West Knoxville is the affluent area, and I definitely wasn’t from there. East Knoxville is a little more ghetto. South Knoxville is very working class. I was going to use Johnny Newark, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well. Knoxville has a better ring to it. I’m a huge fan of all the Johnnies: Johnny Cash, Johnny Thunders, Johnny Rotten. Everyone in my family has a host of names. It’s a Southern thing. My nieces’ names are Cissy, Billie and Flipper, and we have Little Ronnie, who’s also Pork Chop. Then there’s Dusty. There’s also Crusty and the Dust Man.

PLAYBOY: Did you take to performing weird stunts as compensation for not being able to pick up girls?

KNOXVILLE: I never had that problem. I grew up with two sisters—eight and 10 years older—and they and their friends were constantly around me. I always had a wonderful relationship with women. I’m not compensating for anything. I really have no excuse for the things I do. I’m married, and my wife is supportive, but I once made the mistake of telling her that I was testing self-defense equipment. I was going to pepper spray, stun gun and Taser myself, and our kid was two at the time. I went to the desert in a bulletproof vest and shot myself. It was really tense around the house for the couple of weeks leading up to it, so I never again made the mistake of telling her what I do. Now when I leave for work in the morning, I don’t say anything about what’s going to happen that day. She will watch footage after the fact and think it’s funny, but she’ll be happy when—if—I ever stop doing this.

PLAYBOY: Now that you’ve tested body armor, can you make recommendations for those of us who may have to go into harm’s way?

KNOXVILLE: Save up for a good vest. At the time I didn’t have a lot of money, so I had to buy the cheapest vest made, which was like $300, and it only takes a certain type of gun and bullet—up to a nine millimeter. You want to go to the $500 or $600 range for a proper vest. For that price you can get one that will take a .44. And, yes, you can get an armor codpiece. It’s actually great eveningwear for going out on the town, frolicking with your friends.

PLAYBOY: Are your performances a cry for help or is your serotonin level higher or lower than normal?

KNOXVILLE: Oddly enough, I enjoy it all. I created a show with two friends and we hired all our other friends, and it’s a nerve-racking business. There is probably some chemical reaction that causes me to act in this manner, but maybe it’s the adrenaline rush or the rush of eliciting laughter when we actually complete something. I would think it’s more the latter. I would always watch my old man, how he would command a room and how everyone would laugh. This is my poor attempt to emulate my father.

PLAYBOY: As the son of a tire salesman, can you offer tips on how to negotiate a good deal on our next set of radials?

KNOXVILLE: We’ll call Fat Phil and see what we can wrench out of him. He sells new and used tires. Dad’s nickname is Fat Phil from Knoxville, the Round Man with the Square Deal. He owns the tire company, and it has also served as his stage, where he would prank his employees constantly and wreak havoc on most who entered there. Boxcar—Woodrow Wilson Johnson Jr.—would regroove the used tires, and when I was five or six, Dad would let me reblack the tires to make them look new. I would make a big mess, but it was a lot of fun hanging out with all those characters, the people who worked for my father: Big Sam, Ass-Kicking Robert, Big George and a guy named Superdick. They called him SD. He was harelipped, but he apparently more than made up for it with his endowment. It seems I’ve surrounded myself with those characters in my own life now.

PLAYBOY: Were the citizens of Tennessee relieved when you headed to the West Coast?

KNOXVILLE: They were very supportive of me when I moved out to Los Angeles, but they were just waiting for me to make the move and then come back. For the first five or six years my mom and dad kept my room exactly as I had left it. My father and I packed my belongings into this Suzuki Samurai and drove for three days: Motel 6s and truck-stop food—casseroles with Cheez-Its crumbled on top. We almost perished around Kingman, Arizona. A big piece of construction equipment rolled out into the middle of the interstate, and we had to veer off onto the grass. Dad actually flew out and drove back to Tennessee with me a couple months later when I ran out of dough. I worked for a few months to make money and, once again, he drove out to LA with me. We made the trip three times. God bless him for that.

PLAYBOY: Can you set the stunt or prank in the larger context of history and culture?

KNOXVILLE: There was a German who lived around the 1300s—Till Eulenspiegel. I was quite a fan of his growing up. I don’t know if you’d call him a performance artist. I guess he was more of a prankster. Eulenspiegel was not very popular in Knoxville. There’s a Belgian named Noel Godin, a performance artist who pies everyone in the face. He’s still doing it. Then there was Chris Burden in the Seventies, who had someone shoot him in the arm with a .22. He also lay down in an intersection underneath a tarp in midday traffic. And, yes, I was a fan of Candid Camera. We’re trying to take all this to a higher intensity.

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PLAYBOY: Jackass doesn’t strike us as the most original title. Couldn’t you have come up with something a little more creative?

KNOXVILLE: Fuckstick. It’s a perfect fit. We went through a host of names, not many of which I can recall, after reviewing the tape and the show. We actually tried to clear Fuckstick, but MTV didn’t think it was very amusing.

PLAYBOY: Jackass posts the usual disclaimers, warning young people not to try outrageous stunts at home. Would you care to offer another warning?

KNOXVILLE: Yes. We don’t take auditions or submissions. We can’t. I try to emphasize at every point: Do not try what we do at home. We’re taking the hits for the audience. It might look alluring, but there are actually a lot of serious consequences. You’re just going to get hurt and we’re going to get canceled. As a child I was always breaking bones, just because I was clumsy. I broke my ankles a couple of times apiece, broke my hands, broke my arms a couple, three times. I sprained my ankle just last June. A few sprains from the show, ankles and back, but that’s about it, nothing too bad. McGhehey just chipped his tooth doing a stunt—which was good for the show. But it loses its charm if there are any fatalities or incapacitations.

PLAYBOY: Do you have comprehensive insurance and an exceptionally understanding HMO?

KNOXVILLE: We pay a pretty nickel for our insurance. And we have a lot of prepaid legal for the show.

PLAYBOY: We understand you once umpired Little League baseball. What’s the secret to making a few hundred calls per game?

KNOXVILLE: I had a lot of blown calls. My strike zone was pretty wide because I was a pitcher in high school. I was a little biased toward the pitchers. I made the hitters be aggressive at the plate, that’s for sure. It was the greatest job I ever had. I umpired for eight- and nine-year-olds in the Valley. I loved the kids, so maybe that made me a better umpire. When I first got to LA I was waiting tables and bartending for a nickel. About five years later I got an agent and did commercials for Mountain Dew, Coors Light and ESPN. I was in a Taco Bell commercial with the little Chihuahua. We were eating nachos on a boat, and the dog would ride up to us on this mini gondola. Between shots I would have to feed the dog chicken as a reward. That’s my story about the Chihuahua. It was pretty embarrassing. I was never called upon to drop the chalupa. Maybe in the shower with the boys.

PLAYBOY: You attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts—alumni include Jason Robards and Robert Redford. Tell us about your training in classic theater.

KNOXVILLE: The American Academy of Dramatic Arts was my excuse to head west. I moved to Los Angeles—actually, Arcadia. Living was a bit cheaper in Arcadia. I went to this six-week program at the academy. After the first three weeks, it seemed to me that the teachers were just frustrated actors and musicians. I don’t know how much they really brought to the table. I didn’t go back after the third week. My parents called the school to see how I was doing, and they were told I’d quit. They were less than enthusiastic. They paid all that money and didn’t get it back, but I guess that’s all part of growing up. Actually, I never did a lot of theater. There’s not much Stanislavsky can do for you when you’re hitting your chest with a Taser. But I have been working on films lately, and I want to expand that. Ten years from now? Oh my God. I’ll probably be sitting on the front porch with a shotgun, because my daughter will be 15 then. I’m so terrified of that day.

PLAYBOY: In a stunt that was called the Poo Cocktail, you locked yourself in a portable toilet and allowed it to be overturned, showering you with human waste. Given your use of an infantile term for feces, have your parents ever mentioned difficulties with your toilet training or other aspects of your upbringing that might indicate arrested development?

KNOXVILLE: It just adds up to funny every time you say it, so we stuck with it. But please don’t read too deeply into underlying meanings of the show and what we do. It’s truly just for kicks. Today I artificially inseminated a cow. You have to stick your hand up the cow’s rectum and grab its cervix. And I injected sperm into its vagina. Bovine love. I wore a plastic sleeve, but that was the first and will be the last time I artificially inseminate a cow. It had an accident on my hand while I was inseminating it. I’m a little germphobic, believe it or not. I’m a big washer of the hands, and I’ve been in the ocean maybe two times in the past 10 years because I have a great fear of sewage runoff and of stepping on a syringe. I confront a lot of my greatest fears and try to overcome them. I received the proper shots before the poo cocktail. We had antibacterial soaps on the set that day. Palmolive dishwashing liquid is a little abrasive, but it does the trick. Roll around in that for two to three hours and then roll around in it with someone else for two to three hours.

PLAYBOY: You once strapped on a dildo and went about the activities of daily life in a deliberately unselfconscious manner. Does Johnny Knoxville need that kind of enhancement?

KNOXVILLE: I don’t need to be enhanced or augmented. I just didn’t have the endurance to keep it up for eight hours straight while we were filming. I’m not Sting, you know. We shot it over a couple days. If you can keep it up that long, you should be in films.

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PLAYBOY: In one episode of Jackass, a cast member disrupted a golf foursome. Some who find humor in penis enhancement and close fecal encounters might consider such an act the ultimate breach of taste and decorum.

KNOXVILLE: Yes. Yesterday he was out on the course blowing foghorns on people’s backswings. He actually shit in the hole on the 18th green. It’s such a proper sport, and some people take it a little too seriously. Golfing is for people too fat to water-ski.

PLAYBOY: Skateboarding has figured in your journey to Jackass prominence. Can you negotiate a half pipe with ease?

KNOXVILLE: The skateboard world has been very good to me. My proficiency level is low. I do a lot of things poorly. When I was 13 or 14 I skateboarded down the hill we lived on and broke my ankle. My father got angry and threw my skateboard into the woods. I didn’t go back to it for a number of years. I have a skateboard in my car, but I rarely ride it. For the Jackass pilot they tried to teach me how to ollie, which is just jumping. But I was even more unsuccessful at that than I had been at the downhill slalom that broke my ankle. Skateboarding is bigger than ever right now. You can can make a lot of money as a professional skateboarder. They’re the rock stars of the day. They have competitions, but it’s the contracts they make money on. Shoe companies pay them. Clothing companies pay them. They have their own boards and they get money from that. It’s not unusual to make six figures as a professional skateboarder. You go from town to town doing demos. By the time you’re 30 you’re winding down, much like any athlete. Then you hope you can make the transition into a jackass.

PLAYBOY: People of all ages race around on Razor scooters. Do you care to predict the life of that fad?

KNOXVILLE: It will go the route of the hula hoop and Rubik’s Cube. It will be collecting dust in your closet in two or three years.

PLAYBOY: Most pranksters eventually turn out in lingerie. Do you draw the line at something frilly?

KNOXVILLE: I’m not opposed to dressing up in lingerie. I don’t do it, although when I was young half my closet was filled with women’s clothes, because my mother’s closet ran over into mine. Maybe I would sneak a nice sweater or a shirt now and then, a little angora. But we haven’t dressed in drag for any of the skits on the show, just a lot of G-strings and male nudity. We did a stunt that we called Body in the Trunk with Pontius, who has the best ass on television right now. We filmed a stunt where we dueled with paint balls and, of course, he was in a G-string and assless chaps, which proved to be his undoing because he took one in the rear that ended the battle. I’ve never worn a G-string.

PLAYBOY: Do jackasses have groupies?

KNOXVILLE: Jackasses have groupies, but I’m so busy working that I don’t get to go out that much. And that’s good, because you don’t want to get into a situation where someone might throw herself at you. Things have gotten odd lately with all this newfound notoriety. There’s a big upside, but you also don’t get to see your loved ones as much. It has put a strain on my relationship with my wife. We can’t communicate as well, and we’re trying to adjust and make sense of all the craziness in our life. I’m sure we’ll fight through it. Just have to keep things in perspective. You can’t take all this very seriously.

PLAYBOY: Do you have a high tolerance for pain?

KNOXVILLE: Yes. We did a test with cups, exactly what a catcher wears for baseball. I put the cup on the outside of my pants, and we had six third graders kick me in the crotch as hard as they could. From there we moved to a tennis ball machine, set at its highest power, shooting me point-blank in the cup with tennis balls. After that we affixed a sledgehammer to a rope, pulled it up to head height, dropped it and let it strike me in the cup. I took a paint ball to the cup, and then we went up three stories with an eight ball and dropped it down on the cup. That whole cup test was a miserable experience. I hope it won’t affect my chances of having more offspring. Oh, I also took a croquet ball to the crotch. This was all done in a period of about an hour, and there was a little bit of swelling afterward. Obviously, my level of odd is a little higher than everyone else’s, so I don’t look at what I do as that crazy. If I were to stop to think about what I do, I probably would reassess the situation and go fishing.

A few Saturdays back, I was the only father at a watercolor workshop in an Allegheny County community room, turning a sheet of white paper into brown sludge while my six-year-old daughter painted something decent and, as is her wont, imperiously waved off my help. I’d brought her in place of her mother, who had something better to do, despite trying to skip these snooze-worthy arts-and-farts-and-crafts events on principle.

The mothers around me—a passel of well-meaning, well-off women who had plainly done the required reading that circulates on their newsfeeds—were deep in the real work of gender. The $64,000 question (now $773,000 with inflation) was their own concern about their kids’ gender, which struck me as more than these rising first and second graders were worrying about such matters. One described scrutinizing her son for “signals,” the sort of thing the more religious among us might call “signs and portents,” and stood primed to affirm whatever surfaced, while also keeping him current on an orthodoxy that seemingly revises itself every election cycle. Another remarked that she wouldn’t put her child in a Boy Scout troop unless the troop was properly versed in trans issues—not merely “accepting,” she clarified, because there is a world of difference between toleration and thorough understanding. A third had worked out a way to read picture books aloud that kept every animal’s gender and race an open question until her son ruled on it. Not wanting to make a pest of myself and content to continue painting an obese brown cat, I nodded along and thought of this famous dril tweet: “This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender,” he hollers, overturning his uncle’s barbecue grill and turning the Fourth of July into the Fourth of Shit.

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My own approach to all this has been no approach, which I confess without pride because so many of the big cultural questions about The Way We Live Now have had no bearing on my homeschooled and now work-from-home existence. When my father was dying in 2014, he gave me one piece of advice about the daughter I did not yet have but somehow presumed I would. Raise her like a boy, he said, which to the extent I thought about it at all I initially misunderstood. What he meant was not to mandate she become some sort of tomboy, but rather to be there and even things out, to stand on whatever side her mother wasn’t so the kid had access to the whole field instead of half. It certainly never crystallized into a system because there are no systems in our house. There is no gentle parenting in my house, no attachment parenting (apologies to Dr. Mayim Bialik), no trad parenting, no other method with a catchy name, TED Talk, and virtual merch table.

In place of grand systems, we have two parents and a fiercely independent kid who picks between them. She comes to me for sports, for exercise, for video games, for pizza and hot dogs, for chores, and for the Pokémon games. She goes to her mother for art, for shopping, for the cutesy stories about the Babysitters’ Clubs, and for gossip about her peers (I can name the current Rizin MMA champions and the last dozen or so sumo champions but can’t recall the names of friends’ kids, especially friends’ babies, to save my life). On matters of discipline, she does what I say because we both follow precise routines; with her more easygoing mother, she wages open war. By the lights of that community room, the whole arrangement smacks of gender, and is also entirely fine.

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Her current life plan, announced with the certainty of an AI company CEO promising his company will change everything you know, is to train cats like Pokémon and get jacked. Her starter is Hilde, our tubcat of a 14-year-old Maine Coon, who did not consent to a training regimen and already outweighs most of her bracket save for her stepbrother and future “rival,” the gargantuan three-year-old Siberian cat Freddie Pancakes. The getting-jacked part she gets from me. I have spent much of life on the function-over-form side of the ledger, hefting barbells in assorted basements, and she has decided our basement—with the gymnastic rings where she does pull-ups, dips, L-hangs, and skins the cats—is the most interesting room in the house.

The reading she taught herself. She beat Pokémon Scarlet and its DLC nearly solo and after taking several of these ball-imprisoned beasts to level 100, no small feat in a game with no voiceover, only text she pushes through line by line. When she’s not doing that, she’s reading every Pokédex entry in every Pokémon encyclopedia she can get her hands on (”can you believe that girl at school said her stuffie’s name is Camper? That is Yamper! Some people just don’t know their stuff”). The cat-training scheme came from nowhere I can point to. It is hers, and I would not swap it for a hundred validated milestones.

Outside the walls of our comfortable little brick house, panic about the kids seems to be running in every direction at once. There is a left-coded version, where Sherlock Holmes-like parents catch and reaffirm each flicker of identity as it surfaces. The right-coded version, which I have heard more often given my time amidst the post-left and based right, wants to legislate boys back into boys and girls back into girls by force of nostalgia and more bathroom bills than my plumber uncle ever wrote. Both camps read the child as a document to be corrected. My daughter, meanwhile, like the lost-in-his-own-world kid I used to be, is just running her own race, the advice Bluey’s mother Chilli gives her in one memorable episode.

I must confess I am not studying her for signals, signs, or portents of anything in particular. Instead, I am in the basement letting her pretend to spot a barbell she cannot yet lift, or upstairs as she referees standoffs between our two enormous cats. Letting her be exactly who she wants to be, without the kind of scrutiny or theorizing that tends to tangle those things up.

Given that my day job is in employee experience research, I know about as well as anyone that her generational cohort, like the ones immediately preceding it, are cursed. More than 42% of recent college graduates are working jobs that did not require the degrees they sought, the worst underemployment in the nation’s history, and the entry-level roles that once trained them on the job are thinning out first as senior employees assisted by AI, like yours truly, are ordered to assume that work. I am not going to pretend this doesn’t worry me. I also understand that this non-method method is somewhat of a privilege—something not afforded to all kids. But my daughter spent the whole drive home from our art event narrating the next gym battle move for move, correcting me when I got a fact wrong about a move’s effectiveness or an elemental weakness. The kids may not be alright, but I am glad this one is.

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“He’s outside,” Mom texted me. I, a 23-year-old recent college graduate and sugar baby subletting a “bedroom” in a mickey-moused loft on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick off the Morgan Ave L stop with three 40-year-old-men in a punk band for roommates, threw my hair into a messy bun and skedaddled out the door and down three flights of industrial stairs to greet Ermal M., the TaskRabbit my mom had hired to assemble my IKEA BILLY bookcase for me. I pushed the brawny metal door of the building open to—what the fuck?—a Greek god with a toolbox. Wicked tall—at least 6’ 4”—scruffy and ripped in jeans and a cold gold chain peeking out from under the neck of his navy blue t-shirt, he smiled a shelf of pretty white teeth at me.

“Are you… from TaskRabbit?” I asked.

“Yes!” he replied, enthusiastically.

This Chippendale is for me? I wondered as I scanned him up and down, considering the possibility that my mom was playing some weird stripper prank on me. He took me in, too. The dry March wind slapped me with the smell of his cold, earthy cologne. Meat and steel. Our eyes locked. I simpered. His professional smile turned cheeky as he clocked my blush. We burst out laughing(!) from what I can only imagine was the shared shock of finding the other attractive.

Realizing I was being rude and kooky, I said, “Come in, come in! Sorry. This way,” and led him to the stairway, suddenly mindful of what I looked like. Had I known that my mom hired a $60/hour hottie to piece together my cheap (but efficient) furniture, I would’ve worn a push-up bra or something. Instead, I wore a pair of ratty see-through leggings with a cigarette burn in one of the ass cheeks and a sports bra under a light pink tank top. Messy bun glazed with grease. No makeup on.

I bet he’s looking at the hole in my pants, I thought, rolling my eyes at myself and arching my back to show him a good angle of my ragamuffin ass while I walked us up the stairs. I made small talk as he followed. How’s the weather? Did you find the place okay? His voice was buttery smooth. Boyish but brute. How was the weather? And had he found the place okay? I don’t know. I was flustered! But I filled the silence with polite dumb questions and swallowed my huffs of exhaustion up the three flights and through the maze of hallways to the apartment.

“This is me!” I said, letting him into the loft and directing him to two slender IKEA boxes leaning against the plywood kitchen wall. “Can I get you anything to drink?” I asked. “Water? Coffee? Tea?”

“I’ll take a coffee,” he said, placing his toolbox on the floor next to his big brown work boots. I didn’t dare to look him in the face. I didn’t want to catch a case. I didn’t want to sexually harass this man. I did want to sexually harass this man, but I didn’t want to get my mother banned from TaskRabbit because of it. I switched the kettle on to boil and listened to his boots scoot towards the boxes. Music leaked in from the living room. Some indie shit—Pale Saints or Elliott Smith. My least favorite roommate—the one I had drunk sex and hangover sex with just a few days after having moved in (oopsie!)—was home and presumably getting stoned, vaping from his digital juicebox, and YouTubing “How To Leathercraft a BDSM Collar.” I wished he would fuck off and die, then and eternally. As the water got hot, I sat at the kitchen table and opened up my laptop.

“Wtf mom, he’s so hot,” I iMessaged.

“Lol talk to him,” she texted back.

That crazy bitch! Leave it to her to know my exact type. She is a phenomenal gift-giver.

I watched Ermal from the corner of my eye like a lazy-eyed stalker as he lifted and carried the tall, thick boxes to the center of the kitchen. His biceps, two bulky croissants, flaked for my lick. He gently laid the boxes down on the floor in front of him to slice open and handle. Me next! Me next! The kettle roared and bubbled. I got off my ass. He watched as I preheated the French press and bloomed his grounds before filling the carafe.

“Want any milk or sugar?” I asked.

“Sugar, please,” he said.

“Where are you from?” I asked, bypassing the four-minute steep with more dumb small talk.

“Albania.” He was proud. “But we moved to Long Island when I was young.”

“Cool!” I stood on my tippy toes and reached into the cabinet for the bag of sugar which had become brick-hard from nonuse. I pushed the plunger of the press down deep and slow, then poured Ermal a cup of coffee. “Coffee’s ready!”

We stood closer than ever at the kitchen table. Dear God, he was giant with an impeccable physique. My ex-boyfriend had been a wide-necked MMA fan, so I knew about and grew to get wet for these things (overall build, but well-defined biceps and deltoids, specifically). It’s a fascination that makes me feel like a gay man or a sculptor or a serial killer, enthralled and horny by man’s pretty pump.. Before him, I fucked limber, shy art twinks and fuckboys. After him, I fuck like a wolf and fight dirty. Hands, hair, and tongues everywhere. I’m a big girl–heavy-boned, tall, strong, soft, and womanly–and rarely ever feel small. So when a jacked man towers over me, I size up pathetically, am horrified, and love it. Extra points and grool if they’re pretty (like me). Ermal, Balkan bronze, was a fucking Rodin begging to be grazed and soiled by my filthy little fingers. I’ll give him something to think about, I thought as he thanked me and whiffed the steam from his mug. I handed him the sandbag of sugar and a spoon.

“This sugar’s hard,” he let me know.

“You have to work for it if you want to taste my sugar,” I actually said like an 80s porno bimbo or sexual predator. Horrified but impressed by my quick corniness, I laughed. He laughed too, but his lip bite and brow raise signaled that I’d either intimidated him or turned him on. He stared at me as he stabbed and shook the sugar bag, then stirred a heaping spoonful from it into his cup. He threw the hot coffee back like a shot and slammed the mug down. What a guy.

“Oh yeah?” the cocky handyman spat back and winked.

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He returned to his handiwork, folding onto his hands and knees to map out the puzzle of plywood pieces. He didn’t shrink once condensed, but rather, offered me a new view to gawk and drool at. The back of his shirt read “Texas” and flashed a slash of the tanned leather skin of his lower back. I imagined attacking him from behind, mounting him and nuzzling my cheek into the slope between his shoulder and neck, letting myself hang deadweight like a sleepy orangutan against his landslide. My pussy ached empty. I squirmed my clit against the seam of the crotch of my leggings. I seeped wet through them—no panties on (I know, I’m a slob)—and onto the galvanized kitchen chair as I watched the nape of his neck bob for screws and pegs. Get it together, you slut, I dommed myself. I decided that the silent tension contributed to the eroticism, so I blue-balled myself and reverted to talk. We talked about music, food, movies, work, and the trials and tribulations of living and dating in New York. He confirmed his relationship status: single. He’d never fucked or dated a TaskRabbit customer before. I asked him, of course. I learned that he was in his late twenties, an ex-body builder turned gym rat and real estate agent (and TaskRabbit), and an aspiring YouTube fitness trainer.

“I could be the big Albanian guy that Albanians watch for fitness tips and shit,” he pitched.

“Totally.”

Nearly finished with the task at TaskRabbit hand, Ermal stood just an inch or two shorter than the 79.5” frame but nearly as wide. He started on the shelves. The plastic sound of a vape-crackle followed by a baggy sock-shuffle and polluted puff of smoke entered the kitchen. My roommate. The worst. Fuck off, pervert! (like I should talk). But how itty bitty and soggy he looked next to my lumberjack! I couldn’t help but mean girl-giggle at the shithead’s amplified frumpiness. I wished they’d start fighting.

Ermal lowered his drill and nodded respectfully at the elder. Man language. My roommate politely nodded back, then grabbed a White Claw from the fridge. As he popped the top and shuffled back to his living room kingdom, he mouthed a silent excitement at me as if he were cheering, fuck yeah!, while Ermal made an ew-who-is-this-beta? face behind my roommate’s back. I mirrored Ermal’s yuck. Moments later my roommate texted me.

“OMG that dude’s huge! He’s your exact type!” His support surprised me. What, are we bros now?

“I know right?!” I texted back. Fake ass bitch.

With maybe thirty or so minutes of the task left, I scrambled to scheme how to make my move. I mean, hadn’t I been so obviously into this guy, sluttily sticking my ass out and eyeballing him like a sexually-deprived poolside housewife? And hadn’t he matched my flirt, especially with the sugar? Maybe he didn’t want to overstep on the clock? For someone so forward, I’m clueless when it comes to men’s [sexual or romantic] interest in me (unless they’ve paid me, duh). I’ll make the first move, sure—I’m used to it—but I require an obnoxious amount of reassurance to seal the deal. My brain needs to “get” that I’m desired—ideally, more than any other shiny hole in the whole wide world—in order to spread my legs and tight slit open.

“He’s so gorgeous idk what to do,” I texted my mom again.

“Hahaha I’m dying laughing! I secretly did that on purpose. I found the hottest TaskRabbit I could find cuz I thought maybe you’d have a new friend. Is he talking to you?” she replied.

Wow, my sadistic nature is hereditary! Good to know. Fuck it. Fine, I’d lay it on him thicker than glob in hopes of him laying his thick megalith bod on me. What’s a [hot] girl got to lose? Oh, nothing, just my will to live and fuck ever again!

I gasped performatively, “Oh my God! Guess what?”

“What?!” Ermal gasped back, mocking me with playful exaggeration. He was obviously a dick.

“My mom just admitted to me that she hired you because she thought you were my type! I can’t believe her!” Better to blame my matchmaker mother than myself.

He chuckled coolly, unshocked. “Well, am I?” he smirked.

“Duh,” I confessed and rolled my eyes at the arrogant douchebag. I am obviously a brat.

“Then what are you doing after this?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Let’s hang out.”

“Okay.”

Success! How mortifying! Thanks, mom!

“I’ll be right back,” I announced and sauntered a little Rumba-walk to the bathroom. I took a quick but thorough shower to scrub and shave my legs and pussy smooth for my FuckBunny. We will fuck like TaskRabbits, I manifested as I moisturized my pruney flesh and brushed my teeth. I wrapped myself in a skimpy mini-towel and scooped my B-cup tits up-and-in to show off my dew-spritzed cleavage. Now, the fantasy was a bit—a requirement, an assignment, a real-life pornographic opportunity. Seize it! Material!—for writing, shitposting, slumber party storytelling, and learning. This (being a slut) is what your early twenties are for.

I emerged from the bathroom like a femme fatale Looney Tune through a mist of film noir sewage steam. Cue the va-va-voom. Ermal sat where I’d soaked at the kitchen table and looked up from his phone. The bookcase (now complete) stood liminally in the center of the room. Ermal leered at me with twisted, juicy, lickable lips so fat they’d burst caterpillar-goo if I bit them. He leaned back and studied me as I dripped steam to my bedroom in a tizzy. I left him wanting more as I closed the door and swaddled my naked body in a satin, raspberry robe. I welcomed him into my juvenile, borderline hoarder bedroom stacked from floor to 14’ ceiling with tinctures, tea blends, medications, troll dolls, clothes, candles, and animal bones. I knew there was no way he’d be able to fit, never mind fuck, on the lofted bed elevated just a few feet beneath the cracked, mildewed ceiling. Thankfully, I had a sleeper sofa (from IKEA) beneath the loft we could chill and fondle on.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

“Wow, okay! Right to it, I guess…” I snickered.

“The bookcase!” he laughed.

I told him where I wanted it (the bookcase). He bear-hugged and hoisted it above him as if it were an anorexic ballerina and waddled to where I’d told him to put it. I liked telling FuckBunny what to do. Off the clock, he drank White Claws and curiously rummaged through my hoarded treasures. He held up a metal whip like some dude on a dating app with a freshly caught fish.

“What the fuck is this?!”

“It’s a whip!” I giggled, half-embarrassed, half-pleased to have shocked him. “I was a dominatrix for a little bit in college.”

“Sure you were…” he doubted. “Did you fuck them?”

“No…” I struggled to fight a grin. I’m a horrible liar—always have been. Also, what the fuck? What a presumption.

“You fucked them!” he called me out on my bullshit.

“Fine—yes! Only some of them,” I confessed. Why did I do that? What have I done? Will he murder me now? Tell my mom? Damn this sexy, evil man! Why, TaskRabbit, why?!

“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it. Money’s money. I did something like that for a bit too.”

“Oh? How so?”

When Ermal was fourteen, he started his very own YouTube channel. Having gone through puberty earlier than most of his classmates, he took pride in going to the gym, lifting weights, maximizing his protein intake, and widening his bulk, and wanted to document and show off his progress. Every day, he’d post a short shirtless video of him flexing his growing muscles in different positions on YouTube. He went viral. Suddenly, hundreds if not thousands of men were commenting under his videos and commissioning him to flex even harder and say things like, “I’m so much bigger and manlier than you, you puny shrimp.” One of these men made a website for him, managed it, and took 10% of his earnings. A digital pimp. Ermal was neither nude nor “sexual” in these videos. He did this (sold custom fetish content and put his earnings into a high-yield savings account) for two years—until he was sixteen.

While his casual “trauma dump” horrified me, it also made me… even more (and shamefully) attracted to him? Not because of his experience, testimony, or recounting as a means to humor me, but because he had opened up in a way that made me feel special; I doubted he shared this part of himself with his bros or bring-home-to-mama girls. We shared hot person camaraderie. We were just two people who’d always been—prematurely, commercially—“sexy.” Being hot can be very lonely. Funny! Bizarre! Boring! Lucrative! Maybe that was the psychic sympathy we shared when I’d first opened the door to him. And just as we did at the front door, we laughed. For a beat, I regretted having automatically eroticized him. Was I, like these criminal old men, predatory? No. Maybe? No fucking way! He’s a Redwood! A man! He can handle himself and obviously me (at least physically). And I, another “victim” of my own body and how others have historically handled it, could still want and need to give and receive a perverted objectification. We were fine.

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We drank White Claws and cuddled on the futon. I stretched my creamy soft legs on top of his manspread, pointing and flexing my toes next to his crotch. We took turns making fun of each other. Ballbusting as foreplay; very Northeast of us. He played me one of his favorite Albanian EDM songs, humming and fist-pumping to it. The song sucked but his dance was cute. The more we hung out, the less porny and more nerdy he became, which only made me want him more. The more he made me laugh, the hornier I got.

“Can you flex your big muscles for me?” I asked coyly.

Like a good soldier, he answered physically. He stood dominant over me—his groin at the tip of my nose—and peeled his shirt off, baring his swole and hairy Adonis belt and pecs two times the size of my head. His left pec was tattooed with a phoenix rising behind an axe? Super trashy. Hot. His abs? Chef’s kiss; not too lean. I want thick-cut meat. Like a chick’s fat ass or hips, there’s more to grab and pull into. He reached his gorilla arms back, extending his abdomen far past the crown of my head, downturned his gaze to teensy-tiny little me, and flexed. Ding-ding-ding! The boxing bell inside my cervix rang, delivering vibrations down my cunt and thighs and into my toes which now bowed at his Hercules pose.

“Holy fuck,” I groaned.

He dropped his weapons and bent down to trace my mouth with his tongue, licking my pout lightly as if it were the summit of a soft serve. He clutched my thighs like dumbbells. I gripped his marbled beating neck with both hands and pulled his mouth closer into my own to absorb, suck, and pull on his tongue. My pussy pulsated; it sobbed to get stuffed. I whined for his cock, flailing and failing to undo his belt with feral hands. I felt his bulge beneath his jeans. I shoved my hand down his pants and strangled his snake. Fucking huge. Smooth-skinned and hard-boned. Hot breath. He whimpered drool onto my chin as I groped him, his lips snarling at the throb. “I need it,” I begged. He licked his spit from my cheek like a freak, then pushed my shoulders back into the futon, ripping my hand out and away from his wrench. We watched each other hustle to strip. I slid away from my robe, hunkered my feet on either side of the futon, and crunched my pelvis and pussy up to expose myself to him. He ogled my dripping sticky as I rubbed my clit and sucked on my fingers like an attention whore cam girl. He stepped out of his jeans and yanked down his boxer briefs, casting his 5 lb cut cock at me like a fucking 3D movie. “Fuck, you’re so big!” And it was true. I’d never taken a cock that thick and hung before, but I most definitely fucking wanted to [try to]. “Yeah baby?” he patronized and rubbed the head of his monster dick against my mucilaginous slit. “You want it?” he asked. “I want it so fucking bad. Please give it to me. Please.” He folded me in half and elevated my legs onto his upper traps and pushed his tip inside of me.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I breathed laboriously as he sank his shaft deeper and deeper into my pussy, testing the threshold of my little fuckhole. How much more cock is there?! But he continued to sink in and down on me. “You’re being such a good girl,” he reassured me, commencing his thrust and pump. Now we’re fucking. Sweat condensed at my temples from the pressure as he picked up the speed and fucked me fast. I’m lucky that when I’m close to dead from horniness, I drench myself and don’t need much lube, if any. So as he bunched my ass cheeks from under me and screwed me up-and-down and back-and-forth, slipping and sliding and grinding my flexible hinges against his wood, I WD-40ed his underbelly with my splosh. “You’re so wetttt,” he creaked. I nearly cried, “I knowwww.”

I pressed his pelvis away, popping his dick out from my warm spill. I crawled to my hands and knees—face down, ass up—and spread my ass cheeks apart, yawning for his machine to bore into my well. He drilled to the end of his shaft, his balls slapping against my thighs. He smacked my fat ass with his paw. I squealed like a filthy muddy piglet. My head thrashed, ratting my hair between the wall and futon. His mass jabbed my cervix. He’ll split me in half! My hole’s too small for his drill bit! I double-tapped his thigh and cried uncle. He extracted his cock from my swollen, bruised lips.

“You’re too big for me!” I yelped in defeat. “I’m sorry. Can I suck your cock?”

“Yeah, baby. Suck my dick.”

I dismounted the sofa, squeaky and covered with sweat, spit, my own grool, and his precum, and surrendered to my knees onto the cold floor. He relaxed into a manspread. His equilibrium. I filled the negative space between his thighs with my strawberry blood-filled face, resting my head beneath his balls and looking up at Him like God. My offering? My tongue and open throat coated in a spider web of spit. I showed it off. Blowjobs build my self-esteem. I feel my prettiest with a dick in my mouth. It’s a mighty performance. So fun to play and gag! Emit spit! Leak! I kissed his cockhead and cupped his balls, then worshipped the inches with my googly eyes and tongue. I’m sloppy with it. The lubricant is better for the dick and my throat, and I am nothing if not considerate. Like an opera singer, I raised my soft palate and gorged down on his tool, pushing it in as far as my throat allowed it to go. He clamped my head down with his hands and fucked my face, forcing me to pitifully gag a supragastric belch. I’m sure my roommate heard it all. He probably jerked off outside the door. Whatever. He suffocated me until he caulked, filling my esophagus to my teeth with cum.

We wilted together for a ten-minute breather. I asked if I could take a picture of his bicep. He smiled, “Yes,” and flexed. We exchanged phone numbers, got dressed, then hugged and kissed goodnight and goodbye. I checked my phone.

A text from my roommate: “OMG did you guys fuck?”

A text from Mom: “How did it go?”

“Give him 5 stars,” I texted her.

That—the time I fucked a TaskRabbit—was my last (I hope not ever) truly slutty encounter on March 12, 2020. The next day, the United States government declared a nationwide emergency, and all the world’s decent and privileged-enough people quarantined. Ermal texted me. It was sweet. He apologized (unnecessarily) for coming across as just wanting sex. He schmoozed and confessed to wanting to get to know me better. He found me “interesting” and invited me to go hiking with him—an “outdoorsy” date to avoid the virus. I wasn’t so sure. Schools, offices, restaurants, and bars closed. Sugar daddies died. The economy collapsed. I moved back to Massachusetts. And to self-soothe from sickness and death and isolation and violence and bad news and boredom and alcoholism and overdoses and sexual frustration and biocultural decline, we all said “hi” extra loud and to everyone from our phones. Quickly, the internet became society and friend and work and money and diary and surveillance and fun and scary and sex and soapbox and everything and forever. Offline facilities gradually reopened in order of priority. I moved back to Brooklyn. I got a boyfriend. I got a remote corporate job. I got a dog. I moved in with my boyfriend. I broke up with my boyfriend. I moved in with my best friend.

On September 29, 2022, I texted Ermal: “Hey! It’s Madison from two years ago lol (TaskRabbit hookup). I hope you’ve been well! I’m back in Brooklyn! Do you help with moving?”

He replied: “Lol my favorite client! Yea sure. I have an SUV or we can rent a uhaul. Too bad COVID kept us apart cuz I thought you were really hot. And I’m well. Hope you are too :)”

We made a plan. A few hours later, I got a “Someone you may know is on TikTok” notification. Ermal! With 20k followers! He did it! Good for him! Proud and curious, I scrolled through the grid of Ermal in muscle tees, Ermal in hoodies, Ermal in button downs, Ermal shirtless. His first TikTok: December 2021. But his niche wasn’t fitness. He ranted in Albanian. Oh no… Clueless about what he preached, I googled his username to uncover a Reddit discussion declaring him a violent racist, misogynist, Neo-Nazi, and the “Albanian Andrew Tate.” An article doxxed him for having rallied with Unite the Right and Rise Above Movement. My pussy retreated into my gut. What ever happened to shame? What ever happened to secrets? But also, thank God (I guess?) I dug up his moronity sooner rather than another fuck later.

I texted him to cancel our plans, politely explaining that I’d found his social media and couldn’t see or talk to him again due to our sociopolitical misalignments. His response? A tale as old as time. No surprise. He snapped and called me an ugly worthless whore amongst other things. He wrapped up his derogatory paragraph with “Truth hurts. And just so you know, I had these exact same beliefs when you sucked my dick. How does it feel to have blown a man like me? I bet it felt nice.” As a matter of fact, it did feel nice! I missed not knowing him. I missed not knowing any man, depersonalized into body and fantasy for me to eyefuck, choke on, and swallow. Rest in peace to being slutty.

I blocked his number and sent a screenshot of our textoff to my mom, who knew the TaskRabbit and I had hung out but (of course!) didn’t know that we hooked up.

She reported his TaskRabbit account and texted him:

“How dare you! I am very disappointed in you, Ermal M. You should not turn to degradation if someone decides that they want nothing to do with you. Just because your ego is bruised, don’t go lashing out with insults at my daughter. Lastly, you’re lucky to have had your little dick sucked by her!”

Bless her soul for never knowing how big it was.

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I think “simp” has two definitions: the first is basically “someone who pines for someone they have no connection to,” which isn’t new, and “someone who goes to lengths to maintain a parasocial relationship with someone desirable,” usually financial, and this is much more common in the age of social media. One is a crush, and one is a more complicated relationship that is (slightly) less one sided.

I’ve definitely had unrequited crushes and such, but it wasn’t until I was actually buying clothes for a girl from Twitter in order to talk to her where it suddenly clicked, “oh, I’m a simp.” And that’s sort of a statement of fact, like “I’m a nerd” or “I have a very mild benzo problem.” It’s not something I’m proud of or would freely admit, but there’s no point in denying. And I enjoy being a simp, just as I enjoy doing nerdy things. If someone were to say about me, “oh, he’s a simp,” I’d just have to shrug my shoulders and agree.

It’s entirely digital, though maybe that would be different if I were younger. As for my daily life, there are a few women I’ve simped for longish term that I’ll check in with once or twice a week, I’ll send money to them, get pics from them. It’s sort of an extension of using social media in general. I have friends from high school I occasionally talk to through IG, and I have women I simp for who I occasionally talk to through IG (or Twitter in the past) though there’s a sexual element, of course.

It’s much much easier to initiate digitally, and it’s also much easier to connect with “highly desirable” women online; you just DM a girl something flattering after they post a selfie and offer to buy something. “I’ll buy you clothes if you send me pictures of you in them” is a very common simp transaction, and was my first experience with it.

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The first girl I really was an online simp for (sending money, liking all her posts, commenting, etc) was a Twitter e-girl who posted some lewd photo of herself. I drunkenly DM’d her to tell her how gorgeous she looked, she thanked me and told me one of her simps bought her the outfit, I offered to buy her another outfit. That progressed into a consistent thing of me sending her money in order to converse and sext, more or less. Eventually things did get a bit emotional and messy, and we took a break before she returned with a more domineering attitude.

But my first experience with the dynamic in general was in college, where a girl from high school I was friends with (and occasionally did PG-13 stuff with) said she wanted a pair of athletic shorts for her birthday. I bought them for her, and when she said she got them I asked to see them on her. And that kind of has been the most basic element of simping since then; paying for things in exchange for seeing them be used.

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It is definitely a secret part of my life, though it still is more or less a daily part of it. I think a lot of people have more compartmentalized lives since the pandemic, but probably not to this extent. I also think it’s more dignified than the people who comment under porn star posts on their main account.

It seems intuitive and obvious to me that the internet lets us express ourselves in ways we wouldn’t feel comfortable doing in person. Anyone with a finsta should understand the concept of there being multiple selves, some of which are better kept hidden. The concept of a shadow self isn’t really new, but we’ve never been able to so casually swap in and out of it. Who we are on the phone isn’t who we are at dinner with our family.

So while the “real” me values being confident, interesting, desirable, etc, the “phone” me has no problem indulging my id’s desires. It’s like how one might order a grilled chicken breast with seasonable vegetables when at a restaurant, but on DoorDash might get a triple decker fatty burger with extra cheese. Similarly, if I were on a date with someone simp-worthy, I would dress well and talk about places I’ve traveled and my cultivated tastes, but on the phone I have no problem begging that same woman for the privilege to buy her lingerie.Because phone me and real me are completely different!

I think I’m relatively normal in my daily life, if a tad neurotic. Cosmo Kramer by way of George Costanza would be an acceptable comparison. I have a social life, I’m in a normal relationship, I have fulfilling hobbies. I’ve done my share of coke in bar bathrooms with performance artists. I’m a neurotic hipster doofus with too much money and an Ivy League degree. I honestly consider myself vastly more cultured than the average American.

Because of that, I think having my simp self revealed would be a bit disastrous. My friends would lose respect for me and I’d probably be invited to less events. People’s perception of me would instantly turn towards pathetic. Any unique traits of mine would be overshadowed by “simps for women online.” It’s more interesting gossip than anything else about me.

That feels like the main change. People would view me as a simp before anything else

I’d guess I’ve roughly spent around $15,000-$20,000 simping for women online.

I do sometimes feel a sense of shame about it. It’s kind of akin to a hangover. Thinking to myself, “I’m going to regret this later,” and guess what, I do regret it, and I question my life choices and feel down about myself. HOWEVER. This is pretty quickly alleviated by living my normal life and remembering that I do have quite a bit of good things going for me.

I think I’m the sort of person that requires some sort of self-destructive element in my life. The basic elements of being a simp are there whether I like it or not; I’m attracted to women out of my league. Most men are! But the way I choose to indulge those elements, and feel the shame and regret and embarrassment that comes with it, is sort of a luxury. I can do these stupid things and humiliate myself because it doesn’t hurt me in the long run.

“Pain can be a positive thing” is one of my favorite truisms. And, I can afford, financially and emotionally, to experience this unique pain. My broader point is: yes, I certainly feel shame, and that’s both part of the fun and part of some weirder regulatory thing my mind does to remind me to appreciate the normal things. The inherent disappointment that comes with paying women to acknowledge me makes me more appreciative of my normal relationships.

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