I had to go out of town recently for a dentist appointment as medical service providers are few and far between in the great stupid state of North Dakota. Since there was nobody in network in my town, and my previous dentist office hardly ever has an actual dentist on staff — just hygienists and one moron office manager— I had to drive three and a half hours to go to a new dentist for X-rays and a cleaning.
Yes, I had to stay over night in a hotel, rent a car, and drive halfway across a state just for a one hour appointment. It’s insane, I know.
But that’s nothing compared to a completely fucking insane billboard I saw while I was down there.
I was parked at a Wendy’s eating my actually not bad spicy chicken sandwich when I looked across the road and I saw a big yellow billboard for a jeweler in town advertisting payment plans for engagement rings for as long as 48 months.
What??? I almost dropped my sandwich in shock. Who the fuck is financing a diamond engagement ring for four years? Good Christ, most marriages don’t even last seven years. You might be getting divorced by the time you pay the damn thing off.
My mind was blown. I was utterly floored. Are people — “men” — actually doing this, I wondered. I couldn’t believe it. Then I began to think about the many, many imbecilic male slobs I’d encountered in my life. Slovenly creatures in backwards hats, flip flops, scruffy beards, cargo shorts, forearm tattoos, fast food afficionados, fantasy football betting, sports-enthused, vape-toking, video game playing, Monster Energy drink sipping Neanderthals — yes, I could totally see many of these specimens going “Hur dur, happy wife, happy life,” and walking into that jewelry store ready to sign up for basically car payments on a twinkling rock for their idiot girlfriends.
Am I the only one who sees how insanely stupid this is?
How dumb do you have to be to sign up for four long years of debt just for a rock? There are a million better things to spend money on in a new marriage than a piece of bling.
Dear men, stop doing this to yourselves. Seriously.
No woman who truly loves you and wants to be with you would want you to finance a rock for four years. Only a gold-digging Instagram thot who takes seflies at the gym in her booty shorts would demand that, not someone truly worthy of years of your sacrifice and financial hardship.
A worthy woman would want you to put that money toward a house, furniture, a car, baby things, or other practical purchases that really matter and help build the foundation for a successful marriage and family. Not a shiny stone.
An engagement ring is just a symbol. She didn’t win the fucking Super Bowl, gents. Buy her something modest and within your budget, and move the fuck on in life.
In fact, this makes for a good litmus test. The bigger the rock she expects, the bigger the undeserving asshole she likely is.
This simp epidemic has to stop. I mean, think about the underlying misandry of that billboard’s message. It reflects a societal expectation that men go out and financially fuck themselves royally as a traditional precursor to marriage.
Now imagine the message, but directed at women. Imagine that billboard was offering payment plans on appliances like washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers that women go buy so when they get married they can be good little stay at home housewives. Or imagine it was advertising payment plans on BOOB JOBS so hubby can have a nice set of flesh pillows to bury his face in after a hard day’s work. Imagine all the outrage at that.
Well, it’s the same thing with this silly and frankly asinine expectation that men burden themselves for years for a stupid rock.
Fuck. That.
I could see dropping like $5k on an engagement ring. Maybe even $10k if it’s within your budget. But only if you can pay that in cash and it’s not going to force you into indentured servitude for the length of a presidential term.
Marriage is tough enough without additional and unnecessary financial burdens. Why make it needlessly harder on yourself?
I wouldn’t care if it were Sydney Sweeney. I’d rather be single for life than finance a rock for ANYONE.
Despite not having any kids, I’ve become intrigued lately by all the doomsdayers out there raising alarms about birthrates and replacement rates. Elon Musk, who has 14 children with five different women himself, talks about it almost every day on X. Recently, he retweeted a user who shared some shocking graphs:
Source: OurWorldinData
Then there’s this one:
Source: National Statistics Offices
Wow. That is what’s called a precipitous collapse. The West will be extinct before long at this rate.
Anecdotally, my grandmother had eight kids. My biological father had seven. My mother had four. I have two half-siblings who have two kids each. My youngest half-sibling has none, as do I. Only a few of my cousins have more than one child. I’ve witnessed in my time a severe narrowing in the number of kids couples have over the generations. Marriage rates have also gone down. The average age people marry has gone up. And the number of children people have who happen to get married or cohabitate has shrunk across the board.
Not so in Africa, according to the graphs above. Especially countries like Nigeria, which actually has a population explosion that is projected to reach over 400 million by 2050, according to the World Bank. The United States’ population is currently 340 million for comparison.
So, what’s going on? Why can’t the West reproduce itself? I’ve heard all the excuses: expensive housing, cost of living, the job market, etc. However, according to a recent study that looked at the population trends in the African country, “income does not play any significant role in the demand for children in Nigeria.”
The 2022 study is titled “Fertility and Population Explosion in Nigeria: Does Income Actually Count?” You can check it out at this link here.
There are some key takeaways aside from the obvious ones involving increased life expectancy, declining death rate, and high infant mortality. Nigeria has seen improvements in both those areas over the last 59 years, though its infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world, and correlates with the higher number of births.
But if it’s not income or medical care that’s keeping the West from reproducing, what is? Culture, mainly. Take a look at Nigeria’s attitude toward children in general, and see if there’s a marked difference with the West’s.
From the study:
Children are viewed as a future investment and given the uncertainties of them having a brighter future, a poor household can produce more children to try their odds. That is, out of the very many children, some could have a chance to become prominent individuals in the society. Apart from that, some traditional Nigerian households views greater number of children as a strength to the family in terms of providing family labour at the subsistence level.
There are other cultural factors at play, which I’ve broken down here:
early marriage
universal marriage
prolonged childbearing
low contraceptive use
cultural emphasis on large families due to fear of lineage extinction.
I bold-faced the last one because it ties in with high infant mortality.
Fear of extinction fostered increased reproduction in the face of perceived high child mortality with the expectation that some of the births would survive to carry on the lineage.
It also is what most differentiates Nigeria from the West. Those few who procreate here in the U.S. do so within a bubble of relative security. It’s never been safer or easier to have kids from a medical point of view. Yet families in the U.S. remain largely fractured and small. Members are often adrift from one another. Who fears their family name dying out who isn’t named Trump or Musk?
Meanwhile, Nigerians reproduce as if they have a gun to their heads. Is it mostly due to the infant mortality rates? I don’t think it’s that simple. I get the sense that even if infant mortality were to suddenly incline here, it’d be met with indifference. Most women support abortion rights and put off having children until their 30s. Few men want to become fathers. Fertility and parenthood are not treated with celebration but looked at like nuisances. As obstacles to having fun or achieving life and career goals.
People are staunch individualists, focused intensely (selfishly, even) on their career and capital acquisition over reproductive relationships. We’re a culture obsessed with entertainment, dopamine fixes, and endless sensory distraction. To put it crudely, women would rather strip on OnlyFans or sip mimosas at the bar with their girlfriends on Friday nights, while men would rather play video games and jack off to internet porn, than do something as backbreaking like start a family. Much less a family above the replacement rate.
Sex education starts young, with a heavy emphasis on contraceptive use. We all remember the condom and banana demonstration in fifth or sixth grade. Sex ed also pounds on this idea that getting preggo is basically the end of the world. While out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy is obviously not ideal, that anti-natal sentiment carries on into adulthood. Fewer people marry, and hardly anyone marries young. In fact, the idea of getting hitched prior to age 25 is seen as absurd. Your twenties are supposed to be for “experimentation,” and screwing around, not getting serious with anyone.
None of this is to say Nigeria’s population explosion is an ideal to aspire to for the West. Severe poverty persists. Excess population is a drain on resources. In fact, the baby boom is considered a crisis in the country. The study states in its conclusion:
Population control is therefore sacrosanct to save the nation from peril.
Nigeria’s high infant mortality rate also continues to be a problem. By reducing that, in addition to better sex education, the country may be able to reign in its population.
In fairness to the West, medical technology may help extend life spans and quality of life far beyond what’s typical. Many people continue to work into their seventies and beyond, and not just our politicians, either. Plus, our infant mortality rates are extremely low (5.6 deaths per 1,000) compared to Nigeria’s (72.2 deaths per 1,000) and other African countries.
It is possible that a birth rate below replacement is a natural and inevitable byproduct of a modern, developed civilization. But it’s odd and disquieting that even in the face of imminent extinction, our collective response is nonchalance. At what point, if at all, does self-preservation kick in? For many Millennials and Gen-Zers, it will be their social media accounts that will serve as their final legacy, not their genetic progeny. A sad state of affairs.
I found this study fascinating because it helps dispel the myth that income and cost of living are the biggest factors in why few in the West want kids or want many of them. It’s not a financial issue, it’s a cultural one. I don’t see those trends reversing anytime soon, if ever. We’re never doing away with sex education. We’re never going to tell our teens to shack up young or put off college to have a family. We’re never going to be anything but workaholic, screen-addicted, materialistic pleasure-seekers who only seem to have families by accident instead of intention. What modern woman aspires to having kids period, much less four or five? What man would choose breadwinning over fantasy football and e-thots? Face it. We just hate kids.
To quote a meme I recently found on X: “We traded bedtime stories for higher GDP.”
How do you find your missing half when you’re already perfect as is?
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There’s this hilarious scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is over a friend’s house eating dinner and he notices that the glass of water he’s drinking is unfiltered from the tap. This petty but not unimportant observation leads to his host being offended, and Larry (surprise, surprise) getting kicked out.
You just can’t win with people like Larry. You serve them a nice dinner in a nice apartment with good friends and fun conversation, and they’ll still find some unforgivable flaw in your presentation that crumbles the whole affair.
What does this have to do with the point of this article? Well, it would seem many women have essentially become a bunch of Larry Davids, while men are that distasteful unfiltered tap water. Except while Larry David remains cuddly and lovable despite his eccentricities and obsessions with behaviorial minutiae, this whole “men ain’t up to snuff” refrain we keep hearing is getting old and ugly and obnoxious, not to mention making women actually come off looking worse.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “American Women Are Giving Up On Marriage.” A title written as if it should be blasted by a bullhorn atop a castle wall and met with wailing and gnashing of teeth by sackcloth-wearing commoners in the streets below.
However, I think a more honest title would be what I wrote in the sub-title section above: “How do you find your missing half when you’re already perfect as is?”
These types of rah-rah-women articles pop up now and again like herpes sores, and like that STI, they ain’t ever going away. Nor should they. It’s good to be reminded that women are surpassing men and that men are falling woefully behind and that women are so clearly better and have tons of options and that men suck and blah, blah, blah. Afterall, women’s clear superiority may not be readily evident to us boorish and ignorant men with our thick skulls. We must be constantly reminded of women’s superiority and our unfiltered tap waterness lest our puny male brains forget. Frankly, I’d be disappointed if I didn’t see these articles constantly.
I’ll spare you the details of this latest update on the state of the Überfem. It’s your standard, “women are making more money and graduating with more degrees while the pool of men in similar economic positions is shrinking” celebrat — or, lament. Basically, we’re suffering from an epidemic of unworthy, unmarriagable male losers! Meanwhile, the number of elite world-beating boss babes has never been higher.
A 29-year-old woman says of house hunting and having kids:
“I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, a Boston-based accountant. “I’m willing to accept being single versus settling for someone who isn’t the right fit.”
Well, given the absurdly low-barrier to qualify for mortgage loans, virtually anyone is financially self-sufficient enough to “buy” a home if they have a job and a pulse, so I’m not sure how much of a flex that really is anymore.
But let’s examine the glaring contradiction in her statement. This lady is NOT okay with settling with a full-grown man who “isn’t the right fit.” Okay, fair enough. However, she IS okay with giving birth to a child, who could end up being any random personality, good or bad, and to whom she’ll be legally and physically responsible for, and unable to extricate herself from without severe difficulty.
I mean, at least with the man you can dump or divorce him and make him go away (eventually). A kid is kind of stuck in your life FOREVER. Or at least for 18 years.
I could be wrong, but what I’m picking up subtextually from this almost-thirty-lady is a pathological need for control. What kind of a person is incapable of managing the vagaries of an adult relationship, but feels they are finely suited for taking on the rearing of a child? Children as we know never present any difficulties whatsoever. They are houseplants, really. Stick them in the corner and just forget about them.
No, seriously, you’d have to be some kind of anti-social asshole control freak to actually think that.
This next lady was confronted with a simple directive from her mama bear: Get a boyfriend by Christmas. But she ran into complications:
Katie spent the first half of 2024 going on three or four dates a week with men she met on apps, such as Hinge and Bumble, in the hopes of finding a husband before turning 30. By the end of the year, she had ramped down the search, calling it “the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.”
[Bold-face above mine]
Three or four dates a week? For the first half of the year? Hmmm…let me break out the abacus for this one. Thirteen weeks…three or four a week. That adds up to anywhere between 39 to 52 dates in total.
Mind you, these are NOT just random men. These are the men that SHE chose from the vast sea of spermatozoa via the apps. These are the cream of the crop, no pun intended. Yet none measured up after a real-life meeting in the flesh? Seriously? None?
NOTE: If you can’t find an acceptable partner amongst a pool of prescreened applicants that YOU chose for fifty dates, most likely YOU are the problem, not them.
But no, let’s hear the cope:
Many of the men Katie met, she said, either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her. She felt discouraged by just how many of her male friends similarly said they expect their future wives to prioritize their families over their jobs.
By the way, Katie’s big professional ambition is running Lume, a “leadership coaching startup” in NYC. I tried looking it up and the only companies I found with the name Lume were a cannabis dispensary in Michigan and some site that sells women’s deodorant. Since I’m sure Katie’s Lume is a highly lucrative elite consulting empire and surely not just a couple gals gabbing away in a rent-by-the-hour office somewhere, I’ll just assume this glaring oversight on Google’s part in not ranking it on the front page is due to sexism and misogyny.
This next young, er, middle-aged rather, lady, laments a failed relationship, saying:
“He wanted the white picket fence and me at home with the kids,” Jones said. This despite the fact that her salary was nearly 50% higher than his.
Jones is 38, and from her picture, bordering on obese. In other words, she likely has a narrow chance of becoming pregnant and carrying a child fully to term without luck or expensive IVF treatments anyway. So, I’m not sure where her former BF got off thinking she was going to be having kids anytime soon. I’d say that ship has sailed. And since we don’t know her salary, we don’t know how much more she makes than her ex-beau. But it’s not like she’d have to become a dreaded stay at home mom forever. Likely just for a few years until the kid is old enough to go to school on their own. Then she can return to work. Millions of women do this every year. It sounds like her former BF was just concerned that his child would have a committed parent there for him or her for the first few critical years of their life. I say good on him and hope he found someone better.
This next lady is 33 and has a five-year-old from an ex, but she frets she won’t be able to find anyone because:
She has yet to date anyone else in part because she worries about living in a red state with a six-week abortion ban. “I have a child that I can’t leave behind to drive to Virginia if I had a pregnancy scare, and I definitely can’t afford another child as a single mom,” she said.
LOL. Fucking LMAO.
In addition to the litany of criteria men must worry about qualifying for in a relationship, now we must contend with being rejected solely because some lady can’t run to the nearest kill-a-kiddo center in the offchance our rigorous premarital boning results in an unexpected pregnancy?
“Hey Bob, why’d your last girlfriend dump you?”
“Because Planned Parenthood was two states away!”
Imagine hearing that.
What kind of low lifes is this lady fucking? No, let me put it another way. Why would you be okay with fucking a guy but not okay with him babysitting your kid for a few hours while you dash across state lines for the ol’ vag vacu-suck? That’s essentially what she’s saying here. If he’s not responsible enough to babysit your kid, then maybe you shouldn’t be fucking him. Just a thought.
Here’s the deal. When you’re consistently presented with dozens of partner options; when you’re in your late 30s and you’ve sampled a buffet of male suitors for two decades; when you’ve been through college and had one opportunity after another to partner up; when you live in a fucking major city and you still can’t find a guy who “measures up,” it’s not because there aren’t quality guys. It’s because you’re a picky, unsatisfiable asshole. You’re a female Larry David. That is who you are. Only not funny. Not cuddly. And not lovable.
And to quote the hostess from that Curb scene, “I think you should leave.” Thank you.
I was in Wal-Mart waiting in line at the return counter for some stupid reason I forget. While there, I saw a kid who looked nine or ten years old or so and his mom waiting in line. Well, the mom was in line. The kiddo, who was adorned in baggy sweat clothes and looked like a pile of laundry sprung to life, was sprawled out on the one bench, legs spread, one hand fiercely smashing virtual buttons on his smartphone. And whining. Whining, whining, whining about being hungry. So he goes to his mom and begs for a snack. She, without even looking, as though she were spreading bread crumbs for an obnoxious park pigeon, digs into a box of freaking ice cream sandwiches and hands her offspring one of them. The kid tears it open and returns to the bench. All the while his stupid phone game jingles and jangles as he plays it with one hand while stuffing his face with the other.
Now, I don’t think this is an overreaction, but I wanted to punt that kid across the room for acting like that. I stood there in awe watching the tragic scene unfold. You could tell this kid knew how to whine his way into anything, and the mother always, always gave in. He was already fat. Fat at nine years old. The mother was fat. Both had that slovenly, insolent look about them that makes your blood boil and hate humanity.
I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was absolutely unacceptable to behave like that for me growing up. Sure, as a little kid I was rambunctious. But once I was old enough to understand the English language and the concept of right or wrong I knew to be on my best behavior in public. I never acted uncouth, certainly not as old as nine or ten or older.
I wasn’t treated like some wild animal that needed to be placated with sugary treats and electronic distraction. I was treated like a person who required discipline and structure, which is what children need if they’re going to have any hope of reaching adulthood and NOT become gigantic useless assholes.
A few years ago I was visiting a former place of employment to fill out some paperwork. While there I had to sit next to a mother and her five-year-old, who was playing some game on his tablet the whole freaking time. I don’t know what this game was, but it involved capturing fruit or something, and so whenever this kid scored points or whatever, the game would loudly chime, “YOU GOT A BANANA!”
This was an office for a mental health nonprofit, mind you. Not the entrance to Disneyworld. Ironically, this kid and his stupid game nearly made me lose my mind. By the hundredth “YOU GOT A BANANA!” I finally shot a polite glance at the mother, who was playing on her phone, too, and she did finally lower the volume. Yes lady, I have ears. I certainly can hear your stupid offspring’s loud AF game.
An old saying goes that children should be “seen but not heard.” I couldn’t disagree more. I think children should be NEITHER seen NOR heard. In fact, I think children should be packed up and sent to one of those mean, nasty English boarding schools. Like the one in that Pink Floyd music video for “Another Brick in the Wall.” Where the guy yells, “How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” Then, after they turn 18, those newly minted adults can be sent to college or trade school to become productive citizens.
Oh, that’s completely unreasonable. We should let them explore themselves and just be who they are. Children are magical little beings!
No, they’re not. They’re not. They are ignorant. They are stupid. They know nothing. They are clueless. They dont know “shit about fuck” to be blunt. When NASA was launching that gigantic V-2 rocket into space to land on the moon, do you recall seeing any 12-year-olds in that control room with the guys who had those crew cuts and pocket calculators? When you’re watching the Super Bowl, do you see any ten-year-old boys out there on the field throwing touchdown passes? No, of course not. Do you think Taylor Swift just accidentally wandered onto a stage one day with a guitar and became famous out of nowhere? Do you think her parents had to tell her sometimes, “Get in that room and practice that guitar!” I guarantee you they did.
Everytime I go out in public I see kids in designer clothes. Kids playing with smartphones. Kids acting like zoo animals. Kids that seem to run their families. All the while the parents stand there agape like zombies doing nothing.
NEWSFLASH: Kids will not magically fix themselves when they turn 18. An asshole kid WILL become an asshole adult 100% of the time.
I look around and all I see is parents OUTSOURCING every parental responsibility to someone else who is often just as irresponsible or worse. They outsource education to government schools. They outsource nurturing to daycare centers while the parents go out to work. They outsource time and attention to TV and movies and streaming sites like Disney and Netflix. They outsource all knowledge to social media — YouTube and TikTok. They even outsource sexual education. Do you realize that boys as young as EIGHT are exposed to hardcore pornography on their phones? Think of how much that’s warping their brains.
But you just said you want to send kids to mean, nasty English boarding schools. Isn’t that outsourcing?
In that case it’s okay, because it’s way better than them ending up flailing around like an untethered blimp in a Wal-Mart and munching on ice cream sandwiches for breakfast. There are SOME good places to outsource, and if parents are going to behave like brainless dolts then it’s better the kids go somewhere else where they can actually learn and develop. I’m all about practical solutions here not inflexible ideology.
Anyway, what is the result of all this awful outsourcing? Children in school today outsource their studies and their ability to think to CHAT-GPT. They don’t think critically, they just transcribe whatever the all-knowing all-wise AI computer in the sky tells them, as if they were ancient scribes scribbling out a prophetic vision of the future.
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Parents today don’t even seem to really want kids. They regard their own offspring as if they were happenstantial bodily growths. Like talking moles. Something to be looked at curiously, then ignored, or left to the “experts” or “society” to deal with. Parents are letting teachers call the shots. The third grade teacher thinks Johnny should go on Ritalin because he once looked out the window? Better medicate the hell out of our boy. Don’t want to disagree with an “expert.” Some 85-pound woman on TikTok is telling our 13-year-old daughter she should go on an all juice diet to stay thin? Well, we don’t want to interfere. Hashtag telling our kids to eat Tide pods for the lolz? We had no idea that was going on, honest.
Why do you suppose so many young men today have checked out of the dating market and aren’t looking for relationships? What do you think is really powering the incel movement? Absentee fathers. Why do you think so many young women are incompetent door knobs? Absentee mothers who would rather watch some trash on Netflix than prevent their daughters from getting an STD before their sixteenth birthday.
Point is, a lot of social problems these days can be traced back to shitty parenting. I’m not saying good parenting can fix everything. You can’t fix every person. Some kids are psychopaths, for sure. But you sure can mitigate a lot of issues out there.
Oh, but it’s so expensive to raise kids these days. You have no idea how hard it is. Both parents have to work. Inflation, cost of living, double-income households, etc.
Listen, I was born into poverty. I grew up in the lower-middle working class. I started working at 12-years old and haven’t stopped since. I had to pay for my own braces by selling candy door to door. Spare me your lousy complaints. I didn’t turn into some obnoxious hellion adult. Because as a kid I was disciplined and taught there is a right way to act and a wrong way. Not an easy set-up in life, but I made it through and didn’t become a felon or some adult loser who blames “society” for their own patheticness.
You can call me harsh. You can call me unreasonable. But you can’t say I don’t care. I care that kids today are raised right so they can be successful adults. I care that they have the tools they need to not just survive but thrive in the world.
Society must deal with declining birth rates, low population, and the shocking lack of baseline domesticity of our species.
Teenagers at a party in Tulsa, Oklahoma 1947. Author unknown.
I have an ex-girlfriend who was borderline incompetent at most things in life.
That’s putting it as nicely as I can.
Her apartment was always a mess. I came over one Thursday night with groceries to make dinner. Her place looked like a bomb went off. I cleaned up the kitchen, then proceeded to make our meal. The following night I came over and her place was a disaster again. I’m talking plates with crumbs left on the floor by the sofa. Food wrappers left on the carpet. I had to clean up the kitchen again before making dinner for us both.
Her car was equally a disgrace, littered with papers, CDs, food wrappers, and other things.
She was a lazy slob who put ZERO effort into the relationship. She never came up with date ideas. Expressed no interest in having kids one day. Had no career ambitions. Couldn’t cook. Couldn’t clean, except when compelled. She constantly complained about part-time jobs she had. I think she got fired from one as a restaurant hostess.
She could, however, dress well. She looked nice. Put together. The only job she ever performed well at was as a model for a painter. A job that literally only required her to sit still and look pretty for an hour. That’s it.
Oh, and she was “pansexual,” or something that meant it took her a “long time to warm up to being physical with anyone.” Long time as in months or even years.
So, a prude. I love these modern made-up words about sexuality that describe basic human behavior that’s been around for thousands of years.
Unsurprisingly, our relationship did not last. I couldn’t stand to be with someone who seemed incapable of baseline adult functioning. She was also petulant and child-like in her attitude. I once took her to a college football game and she literally sat there and stewed the whole time. This was after enthusiastically agreeing to go. We left at halftime.
Now, possibly this lady was inadvertantly trained to be useless. She was the baby in her family, and her folks had money. So, there might have been some poor upbringing in there. But her older sister and brother were competent adults with jobs and families and drive. What the hell happend to her, I used to wonder, before finally breaking things off.
It wasn’t just that she couldn’t do most adult responsibilities. It was that she almost seemed proud to be deliberately helpless. It was a badge of honor. This is not a unique thing amongst many modern women I’ve observed, especially uber feminists. Domestic duties are somehow seen as beneath many of them. As if being able to do laundry and clean the kitchen is a betrayal of some feminist code or something. Yet such duties are common household functions. I do them all the time and I don’t feel “feminized.” It was just one of my chores growing up that I still use in my everyday behavior today. Because, you know, I like things being clean and not disgusting around me.
The oppressive, patriarchal 1950s we’ve all been told was a living nightmare for women. Photo from 1959. Author unknown.
Years ago I had a very good-looking friend. I mention he was very good-looking because I’m quite sure his attractiveness was the source of all his good fortune in life. He was a POS lazy ne’er do well, otherwise, and the kind of guy I tend to have contempt for. But he was a nice guy and had an easygoing personality. He had an attractive girlfriend who did EVERYTHING for him. She cooked, cleaned the house, managed his finances — giving him an “allowance” out of his own pay after deducting for expenses —all while holding down a full-time job. She also had a bachelor’s degree. They were an odd couple. She was a driven, capable professional. He was a former pot dealer who slept on his friend’s sofa before shacking up with Wonder Woman. There could not be a bigger contrast. Yet they were together.
It wasn’t all sunshine and roses. My good-looking friend confided to me one evening that he and his girlfriend hadn’t been intimate in a long time. I was surprised, kinda. I suppose it’s hard to fuck a guy — even a hot guy — when you’re practically his mother. They’re married today, however. A development I’d cynically say was probably due more to the sunk costs fallacy than some genuine deep connection they shared. Or maybe my bum ass ex-friend actually matured and started pulling his own weight for once in life.
He was also your typical gamer dude, capable of long hours in front of the big screen zoned out doing whatever-the-fuck. What is it with dudes and gaming nowadays? I played the original NES for a few years as a kid, but that was it. If I try to play a game now I start to go quietly insane. They’re so stupid and pointless. Yet guys in the their 30s and beyond will devote hours and hours to seeing if they can find a silly fucking sword or something for their character. I know guys with huge tattoos of their favorite game characters. That’s just weird to me. So many men are stupidly infantalized, desocialized, and underperforming these days. When you throw in ubiquitious pornography, and you might as well have most men plugged into a 24/7 morphone drip. We may not live in a bombed-out hellscape, but our society feels very dystopian these days.
As nice as my friend’s girlfriend was, honestly, I’d go crazy in a similar set-up myself. I don’t need a woman to baby me or run my life. I do just fine on my own. And the no sex deal…well, that’s a deal breaker, right there. Especially if we’re living together.
My point with all this is that men and women are not optimized for one another anymore. They are not optimized for a marriage or relationships in general. We are only optimized for our own individual needs, wants, and desires. We are like Baby People crying out for our bottles. There is only one word that exists in the collective unconscious — ME. Me, me, me.
Possibly — well, quite likely — this is the result of our ultra-individualist society. We are trained from birth to go through the school system, get an education, all so we can squeeze ourselves into some corporate Borg Cube. All while being hypnotized by the glowing rectangle of the computer/phone screen. Recently, I saw a post on X about how Gen Z women rank marriage as low as seventh on their list of priorities. Career and college were likely at the top.
I’ve mentioned before how in college when asked our future plans no one, not even the women, mentioned things like having a family or kids. Frankly, the very idea seems quaint and cringe or characterized as “traps” to anyone who isn’t a bonnet-wearing Mennonite or an immigrant from a region where having 5+ kids is basically a rite of passage. That’s honestly a shame, and narrows the reproductive window of opportunity. The women in my class were not in their teens, but mainly in their mid-20s. By contrast, my mom had me when she was 24. She had four kids. My grandmother started late relatively-speaking for her era, at 28, but she had 8 herself. Out of all my direct family, half-family, and former family, no one has had more than three kids, with most having none or one. And many of the women in my family had their kids after 30, which historically is pretty old to have a kid for the first time. I have none myself.
I don’t say of any this to shame or make fun. It’s just rather sad, and maybe more indicative of a restrictive and toxic economic climate than a statement on the broader culture. Or perhaps all our comfortable modern technology has lulled everyone into a numb ennui toward family and offspring. Who wants to change diapers when you could binge watch the latest Netflix slop? Why have actual kids when you could be a dog mom or a cat dad?
As in my two examples, even when relationships do miraculously occur, they can often be fake and unfulfilling as plastic flowers.
Whatever the reason for the divide, it seems men and women need some kind of New Deal. A restart. A reacclimation to one another. We put all this time and effort into training people to become monkeys for our corporate overlords. Why not add a School of Domesticity? Or at least pivot our cultural attitudes toward viewing genuine human connection as a natural positive, and not a punch line.
Man, I miss the 90s. Discovering the world wide web. Baggy skateboard jeans. TGIF. No smartphones. Alt rock. CDs. Neon-colored clothing. Polo Sport cologne. Nintendo. Going to the mall. Blockbuster. Pizza Hut. Going outside to play and disappearing most of the day with no way for parents to contact you (yes, that happened, and it was awesome).
Life before the internet became mainstream meant you had to get creative to have fun. You might have even had to go outside. Crazy, right? But there was a time — a much nicer time, if you ask me — before everything became digital and took place on a touch screen. There were also some pretty weird games and toys, too. Here are a few of them from the best decade ever — the 90s.
Props to whatever genius dropped acid and came up with this game. And for thinking this would actually occupy children’s attention for more than like ten seconds. It never did mine or my siblings. I think the record amount of time we spent playing it was five minutes.
Basically, the “game” was a mini leaf blower in the form of a cute elephant that blew plastic butterflies out of its long snout all over the place. The object was to catch as many butterflies as possible in your little net. Whoever caught the most was the winner.
I guess Elefun was meant to sound like “Hella fun.” Except it was mainly a big pain in the ass to clean up afterward. This game is still available somehow, and makes a great gift for parents you hate.
Mr. Bucket
You might remember Mr. Bucket from his catchy commercial jingle. “I’m Mr. Bucket. Buckets of fun!”
Mr. Bucket needs you to do one thing. Stick balls in his head so he can spit those balls back out of his mouth. This is something Mr. Bucket needs you to do a lot. He enjoys very much, you see, shooting balls out of his mouth. While rolling around on the floor. Yeah, that Mr. Bucket sure was a freak. Always wanting you to put your balls in him. So he could spit them right back out at you. It was totally a normal kid’s toy. Absolutely normal.
Even as an innocent non-innuendo-understanding kid, there was just something not quite right to me about Mr. Bucket. He just seemed off. A little too eager to have balls put in him. I mean, I liked playing with balls too. But not that much.
Mr. Bucket. Buckets of fun? More like buckets of repressed memories.
Fuck this “game.” Seriously. It wasn’t even a game. I’m convinced it was a psychological torture test some scientist invented to drive kids into therapy.
As the name implies, this “game” involved setting up plastic dominos in various patterns, and then knocking them down. Dominos is an old game, of course, but this game made the dominos cool and hip with neon colors. Some even glowed in the dark. There were various versions of this “game.” But they all only accomplished one thing — pissing you off, because no matter what, you’d always end up knocking down the dominos prematurely, thus ruining any chance at enjoyment. And this was before YouTube or social media where you could have at least uploaded a recording of a successful rally.
Making matters worse, the dominos would always go missing, forcing you to ask your parents to buy supplementary packs. The whole game concept itself was faulty from the get-go. The makers actually expected little kids to spend hours painstakingly setting up precariously-placed pieces of thin plastic that could be blown over with a whisper. Seriously. Hours of hard work could be derailed in seconds by an errantly-placed index finger, a troublemaking sibling, a clomping pet dog, or an oblivious shuffling adult on their way to make dinner or do laundry.
The ancient Greeks had Sisyphus and his boulder to learn about the horrors of futility. We 90s kids had Domino Rally.
I still have no idea what the hell this contraption even did. Was it some kind of trivia device? A sound effects machine? A tactile-learning tool that prompted hand-eye coordination? I don’t know and The Great Unsolved Mystery Of Bop It still bothers me to this day.
I do remember there were different variations of this toy thing. All in weird geometric designs that emitted wacky sounds. But the very few I ever saw in the wild as a kid were never used for their intended purpose, and instead were turned into play swords. Or as a baton kids would use to bop other kids over the head with. Hmmm…maybe that was the ulterior purpose of Bop It all along.
Okay, this was actually a really cool toy, although it was really more of an exercise device. It was really simple to use. You looped it around one ankle, and then spun it around, skipping over it with your other foot.
I like to think of Skip-It as the real foreunner to the Fit Bit, or any other kind of health-tracking wearable device. Skip-It cleverly had a counter on it that kept track of how many skips you made. This lead to competitions. All in all, a decent toy.
There was just one problem.
Skip-It was known as a girls toy. They came in pink. But many boys (including myself) were always trying to use because it looked like fun. And because it was a girl’s toy, it was easily broken, even when you used it delicately. The cheap plastic would snap apart. Or the counter would stop working and you had to count your skips yourself. Then you add roughhousing boys trying to show off in front of the girls and you can see where this tragicomedy is headed. Yep, a lot of Skip-Its met their demise at the hands (or feet) of careless young men, and a lot of young women were left bereft of their expensive proto workout trinkets.
I actually had to look up what these were called as I never knew. I just always thought of them as the little Saturn-shaped balls you jumped on and hoped you didn’t break your ankle in the process. I’m convinced toy manufacturers in the 90s were in league with the medical establishment, and were just trying to get as many kids injured as possible to drive up insurance rates. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
It sounds insane even describing how you use a Pogo Bal. You step on a dinky little platform which surrounds a rubber ball. Then you try to balance on the ball and jump around on it. Like using a Pogo Stick. Except without a stick and without the fun and ability to balance. God, what a lame toy this thing was. They coudn’t even give the “ball” two proper letter “LLs.” They had to use one “L.”
Even as a kid these things looked dangerous to me. I might have tried using one once or twice, and that was it. I was fine going off ramps with my bike. I was fine crossing stranger’s yards as a shortcut to get home. I was totally fine riding off by myself for hours into different parts of town. But this thing. This bouncy ball of doom. It scared me.
Girls had the Easy Bake Oven. Boys had Creepy Crawlers. Same idea. Both had a little oven. Both used recipes. Only difference was that instead of making delicious mini snacks, this contraption made groteque little rubber bugs that boys then left lying around to “scare” the girls. I’m not sure why the makers of Creepy Crawlers were trying to perpetuate a gender war. Especially after boys were out there destroying girl’s Skip-Its left and right already.
Overall, Creepy Crawlers was a clever way of making “science” fun, combining creative mold making with entomology. No doubt this game inspired some kiddos to go into biology, smelting, or 3D printing. This was probably my favorite 90s game. It wasn’t really a game, I guess. It was more of just a fun project. The best part was you could make a whole collection of bugs, swapping out different colors to make your own designs. The scorpion models were my favorite. Some rubber composites even glowed in the dark. Creepy Crawlers was that rare playtime activity that was even better than Nintendo (my addiction at the time) or watching TV (my second addiction).
Now that I think about it, I’ve been remembering a lot of these toys and games through a nostalgia haze. Turns out most playtime stuff from the 90s sucked. Did the manufacturers secretly hate kids? Their products were mainly cheap plastic and often got children hurt. Their real insidious purpose seemed purely to separate poor parents from their hardearned money via manipulative commercial campaigns. And putting children in the hospital. These toys and games weren’t fun. They were actually pure evil. Well, not Creepy Crawlers. Creepy Crawlers was solid.
They say you aren’t totally dead until your name is spoken for the last time.
For some it will take longer than others. Much, much longer. I can’t imagine we’ll stop saying Julius Caesar’s name anytime soon. He did pay a high price of admission into Club Immortality, though, what with all those knife wounds in the back.
Or Genghis Khan. Especially when he was such a prolific baby daddy that even today 1 in 200 men in the former Mongol Empire share a common male ancestor — which was almost certainly him. Guy must have had a hell of a Tinder profile.
Adolf Hitler will be hanging around for a bit. History is filled with noteworthy murderers. In fact, that seems to be your best bet for a ticket into the remembrance afterlife. We won’t soon forget Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong either.
Most of your prominent dictators, kings, barbarians, and major leaders down through history, good or evil, beloved or reviled, will likely live on in the collective consciousness. Ozymandias’ statue may have crumbled in the desert, but hey, we’re still talking about him, aren’t we?
After that, the list starts to really narrow. It’s mainly inventors and scientists like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. Influential artists and thinkers like Shakespeare, Socrates, or Leonardo da Vinci. Explorers such as Christopher Columbus or Neil Armstrong. Religious figures like Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Then a smattering of other human highlights. Your Typhoid Marys (Mary Mallon), Rube Goldbergs, and Roland the Farters.
Yes, Roland the Farter was a real person, and apparently, he was gastronomically quite skilled.
Sadly, I don’t think many Medium writers will make the recall cut past even 100 years from now, except maybe Barack Obama and other big names who happen to have accounts here. Sure, some server in a cave somewhere will probably have all of us stored away. But how desperate will those of 2124 be to read through hot takes from the 2020s? How many bestselling books or films do you know of from the 1920s? I can think of one off the top of my head — The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It’s a sobering thought experiment calculating your “moment of oblivion.” Mine is probably around the year 2135. I was born in 1982. The average male life span in the United States is 80. I’m currently childless. If I were to have two children in the next ten years, my kids might be in their 30s by the time I die.
Everyone remembers their parents and talks often about them. So, at the least, I’d be remembered by my own kids until they pass away, possibly sometime early next century.
If my kids have children of their own, my grandkids would certainly remember me, assuming I live long enough to get to know them. Everyone loves their grandparents. If my future grandkids are born while my kids are in their late 20s or early 30s, they would live until around 2135.
After that, it starts to get real murky. Very few people ever know their great grandparents personally. Often you just know their name and some basic biographical information. Maybe a few family members have stories about them. I have no idea who my great great grandparents even are.
So, that’s it then. 2135. My Moment of Oblivion.
I could improve on my date with nothingness by living longer. Maybe I add ten more years then. Or I could have more kids than just two. Working against me there is the fact that I’m starting late. But if I were to live to my 90s and have five kids, and my kids have a bunch of kids, then perhaps I could stretch my remembered self to the mid-2100s. I’d have to be a real prodigious procreater like Genghis Khan to make it past the next century via genetic legacy alone.
If I don’t have any kids, then I’d be reliant on my nieces and nephews to remember their favorite uncle. That would get me no farther past sometime early next century. Aunts and uncles are rarely remembered past one generation.
Aside from being remembered by family, I’m left with having to do something extraordinary to make a big enough impact. I’m not a king, scientist, or explorer. I’m just a writer. Even if I were to write a huge bestselling book — like the next Jaws or Gone Girl — that probably only buys me notoriety for a few decades. The only two authors living today that I could see still being remembered in 100+ years solely due to their writing and not counting their offspring are Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. I don’t see myself getting that lucky.
Of course, if I were to somehow manage to kill millions of people, that’d be sure to keep me in everyone’s thoughts for centuries to come. But I’d have to really raise the bar there. I’m competing with some heavy hitters. Hitler killed around 17 million. Stalin whacked 23 million. Mao had a whopping 49–78 million extinguished.
How many would I need to kill to ensure I stick around forever? 80 million? 100 million? I think I’d better shoot for 100 million just to be sure. That’s a nice round number.
No, I think I’m okay with 2135 being my final goodbye year. That’s still 153 years of being thought about and talked about. Not a bad run for an average person.
When do you think your Moment of Oblivion will be?
Dean Brooks 