A came across a recent post on a BoardGameGeek (sort of like the IMDb of board games) forum from a user overjoyed to announce that he’d just released a free online platform for playing board games, featuring such exciting titles as ::checks notes:: “Tic-Tac-Toe.”

No, I’m not linking to the post because I don’t want to bring it any more attention than it already has. I knew what it was from almost the first word of the announcement: AI slop. And the way I knew is because I’d read virtually the same announcement elsewhere hundreds of times before: a small team of people (oftentimes just a single person) built a new, free app and wants users to try it out.

It wasn’t just what the post was saying, it was the particular wording. The bland joyfulness comes through in every sentence. Imagine Miss Rachel with dead eyes and you’ve basically got the feel right.

So it was no surprise to see the first response to that post noting the AI-generated images which permeated the page. And if they’ve got AI writing the post and producing the images, you know that they sat back and let Claude code the site for them.

Which leads me to my confusion: What, sir, did you actually do here? And why did you bother to do it?

You came up with the idea to make a website. Where people could play games that other people designed.

Remember back in school when the teacher would assign you group projects and one guy wouldn’t do any of the work, but would end up taking the same credit as everyone else? This is exactly like that, but without the group.

But perhaps I’m being too dismissive. Because when he starts whining and making excuses, I do think that may actually be him writing all by himself:

“We’ve already decided that if, one day, the project’s growth allows us to reinvest, it would be entirely towards graphics created by true artists. Unfortunately, we can’t afford that right now.”

Let me tell you something: Earlier this year, Mega Crit released a beta version of their new game Slay the Spire 2. If you haven’t played the original Slay the Spire, I strongly recommend it — it’s about as addictive as games get and you can pretty much run it on anything from your PC to your phone and it plays well.

So I was very eager to play this sequel and bought it as soon as it came out, even if it was still in “Early Access” (meaning it wasn’t done yet and the devs are still working on it).

So the art isn’t done yet. And the creators could have used AI mock ups as temporary solutions to speed things along, but that’s not what they did.

These are actual images from the original release of the game:

Ladies and gentlemen, my three-year-old niece could have produced that. And it is charming as hell.

The developers explained their reasoning:

If we use art that looks nearly complete, then people would think that that’s going to be the final art. It has to look like shit. It’s important that it looks like shit.

They also point out that, as amateurish as the temp art they’re using is, there’s intent behind it that you don’t get from prompting an AI. Every single one of those lines in each image — all roughly twelve of them — was explicitly made by a human being to give an idea of what they wanted the final art to look like when it was polished and done.

Generative AI has a very distinct look and feel. At first, to a lot of us, it was kind of neat. There was a cool kind of shimmer to it. But it’s been around for a few years and it already looks dated. All of it. Including the stuff that the latest models are generating.

Slay the Spire 2 has, so far, sold maybe about 7 million copies. And that’s with the art that looks like it was made by a toddler after mommy accidentally filled their sippy cup with wine.

Are you telling me that your art skills are so shitty that you can’t even draw something better than this?

I understand not everybody is a great writer, but you seriously need a computer to write a post on a board game forum for you? Maybe you’re not the best wordsmith in the world, but you don’t need to be Charles Dickens to say, “Hey! I made a website where you can play games. Anybody interested in testing it out?”

If dril didn’t need AI, proper grammar, or reasonable punctuation to produce bangers like this:

…then you don’t need it to produce your forum post.

If XKCD exists, then you can’t use poor drawing ability to justify your lack of success.

I’m currently in New York and, last night, I saw a truly remarkable stage show inspired by the Paranormal Activity movies. There is a moment in the first act that is so shocking that the audience (myself included — and I do not scare easily) let out a collective scream followed by one of the loudest and longest rounds of applause I’ve ever heard.

It would be unfair of me to reveal what exactly happens, but suffice it to say that something truly impossible appears to occur right in front of your eyes. It’s terrifying, delightful, and — to me at least — strangely beautiful.

My eyes are tearing up just thinking about it.

I don’t know exactly how they pulled this effect off, but I’m reasonably confident that it required a miracle combination of timing, acting, engineering, and creative ingenuity. And the show’s went through all that work just to give their fellow human beings a spine-tingly sense of delight.

And, as a result, I felt a sense of connection to everybody else in the theater that night.

That is true art.

What I saw in the show was fake, of course — the stage wasn’t truly haunted and the people were just actors performing roles—but it’s fake in a very deliberate way. The late magician James Randi used to refer to himself as an “honest liar” because, though he’s lying to you in producing his illusion, we gave him our consent to do so when buying the ticket.

He contrasts that with, for instance, faith healers and scam artists who are dishonest liars: people who present their lies under the guise that they’re real.

We can no longer trust what we see on the internet. I’ve read multiple posts here on Medium with titles I found interesting only to be disappointed when the text reaked of LLM blandness. That is dishonest lying even if every word of it was true. A novel written by a human, even a complete work of fiction, is honest lying. See the difference?

It makes me wonder, quite hopefully, if generative AI technologies will lead us away from the internet and back into real life where connection to other human beings is guaranteed.

I, along with much of the country (and likely the world), have been thinking a lot about Dolly Parton in the weeks since she passed. It’s a testament to her as a human being that we’ve been struggling to balance discussing her astounding work as a philanthropist with her remarkable abilities as a singer-songwriter (one of my favorite fun facts about her is that she not only wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” — two all-time bangers — but she wrote them both the same night).

But what made her special is that you can’t actually separate the two elements of her personality.

She was a one of a kind individual and the world is genuinely a lesser place now that she’s not in it.

Mourning her loss is only natural, but there’s something better we can do: honor her legacy.

We need to understand the difference between words and writing, pixels and pictures, and sound and music. Computers can produce the former on their own. They cannot produce the latter unless guided by a human.

I’ve seen the argument made that AI “tools” will help make art more efficient, but that’s the thing: art isn’t supposed to be efficient. What we do for recreation is, almost by definition, completely inefficient.

One can imagine these tech bros saying things like, “Well, sex is great, but what if we could take care of it in half the time?” Or scoff at runners because they could be finishing their races much faster if only they’d thought to sign up for a 100m dash instead of a marathon.

Y.L. Wolfe recently recommended the book Alchemised to her readers:

When Book Boyfriends Ruin the Real World for You

The book is over 1,000 pages long and, as I started reading it, my initial thoughts were “this book is too long.” But that’s because I was focused on the million other books waiting for me in my to read pile and there’s this weird mindset I have that my goal is to get through that pile as fast as I can.

That’s not the goal. And that’s a good thing, because I have no possible way of completing that pile.

The winner isn’t the one who reads the most books. It’s the person who enjoys reading them the most.

With that in mind, I took a deep breath and started back over with the book in an attempt to savor every page. And I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

There’s certainly something to be said for authors “(trying) to leave out the part that readers tend to skip,” as the late Elmore Leonard once said, but if you like reading — as I do — isn’t a long book just more of a good thing? Why not try to be in the moment and appreciate that this is a part of your life where you don’t need to function like a machine. If it takes you a month or even a year to read a single book, does it matter so long as you enjoyed it?

All this is to say that we have capitalistic forces trying to pressure us into a worldview that only results in misery, where everything is a kind of competition and the supposed winners never seem to truly be happy.

Dolly had the right idea. When you see her in interviews, she’s always having the time of her life, happy to be exactly where she was at exactly that moment, smiling ear to ear and making jokes, but never punching down.

If you’ve made it this far in the post (or at least skimmed to the bottom to try and figure out what the hell the point of it all was), I encourage you to try to remember that the purpose of the things you love is to enjoy them. That could be hobbies, senses, other people, or anything you’d like.

However, whatever it is, make sure that it’s real and not what the corporate overlords are telling you to love.

Stay human, my friends.

I hate Friday the 13th. In fact, it may very well be my least favorite movie. There’s virtually no story. Instead, we get one death scene after another featuring characters whose only motivations seem to be to get laid and die. And, not only is it a really shitty movie, but they killed a living snake on screen as the crew member who owned said snake had to be held back, tears streaming down his face.

Yet, here’s a new movie (Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma) that finds inspiration from the Friday the 13th series and I can’t it out of my head.

I saw it a week and a half ago and, when it ended, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. It was weird and, towards the end, it seemed to abandon any semblance of a literal logic or plot in exchange for a kind of dreamlike trance.

The title, poster, and general vibe evokes slasher movies of the 1980s, much in the same way writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s previous movie (I Saw the TV Glow) paid homage to horror TV shows of the 1990s. But while their previous movie bored me to the point that I thought I might doze off before it ended, this one held my attention and tickled my emotions in ways that I’m not sure I can fully explain.

Generally, my understanding is a review is supposed to tell the reader whether or not they would enjoy the piece of media in question, but I don’t know if I can help you with that. On the surface, this is the kind of movie I find extremely off-putting. It’s artsy and pretentious, avoiding a standard three act structure or any obvious sense of conflict and excitement in favor of metaphor and subtext.

My instinct is that you’ll hate it, whoever you are.

And yet, I found it affected me on a deep personal level so much so that I feel the need to share the experience with someone else. Much like a powerful dream, full of unclear imagery, I’m compelled to tell as many people as I can about it even as I fear I’m probably boring them.

But the reactions I’ve seen on the internet suggest it’s not just me. In a world of algorithms attempting to give everybody unique and personalized experienced, it’s impressive that a movie — which shows the same images and sound for everyone who watches it — seems better designed specifically for me than my Netflix recommendations.

In so much as there’s a story — in a conventional sense — it follows a young director, Kris (Hannah Einbinder, radiating charm and beauty) tasked with remaking a classic slasher movie. But, before she does, she wants to meet the star of that movie (Gillian Anderson, chewing the scenery with an over-the-top Southern accent) to get her blessing.

What follows sort of feels, at first, like a modern update to Sunset Blvd., but instead of Kris manipulating the aged starlet for her own gain, she becomes enamored with her. Between scenes of them getting to know each other, we watch them watch the original Camp Miasma movie, though it feels like they’re doing more than watching it. It feels as though they’re reliving it and it becomes clear very early on that, like in I Saw the TV Glow, we’re getting two movies for the price of one. Or maybe they’re the same movie.

I’m not sure I can answer any questions about Camp Miasma with any kind of certainty.

It’s a movie built on vibes and oozing with style, with the studio trying to sell it as horror because how the hell else would you classify it? There’s a serial killer and plenty of extremely bloody murder scenes, but none of them are the least bit scary, in part because of the goofy style Schoenbrun films with. One sequence—which feels destined to become a classic—features the killer knocking off people left and right with the Counting Crows’ “A Long December” playing in the background and I can’t imagine even the most squeamish of viewers feeling the urge to look away.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is it’s encouraging me to want to rewatch I Saw the TV Glow a movie which — again — I found an absolute ordeal to sit through.

At the same time, I remember after watching Glow, I had a similar experience of being unable to get the images and details out of my mind.

Later on, I learned that Glow had a particularly profound effect on trans viewers and spoke to their experiences in ways that I still don’t really understand, even after it’s been explained to me. That’s not a criticism, mind you. It’s just an admission that the movie wasn’t intended for an audience that includes me.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma apparently also reflects the trans experiences of Schoenbrun and often in not especially subtle ways (transphobia is one of the more common ugly tropes we see in older horror movies and this movie isn’t afraid to say so directly). I appreciate their willingness to make something personal without fear of watering it down for a general audience.

However, they also somehow made it just universal enough for me — a cis-straight man — to also feel a connection to the material. Maybe it’s the pure passion coming out of the screen or maybe it’s just that we’re all trying to figure out who we are in ways that go beyond just gender.

When the movie ended, I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked it. The next morning, I was pretty sure that I did. Now, a week and a half later, I’m thinking it might be my favorite thing I’ve seen so far this year.

But that’s not a recommendation.

If this sounds like something you might like, by all means go try to check it out before it leaves theaters. Or maybe it’ll be streamable in a month or so.

But if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, that’s cool, too.

I didn’t write this to recommend this to you.

I wrote this to share an experience I had.

Right now, I’m dealing with depression and powerlessness related to personal life issues as well as the state of the world as a whole. This movie, for a couple of hours, rose me out of that funk and made me feel seen.

Am I being hyperbolic? Am I forcing an emotional response because I’m in a place where I needed it most?

Maybe. But I don’t especially care. I can’t wait for a chance to return to Camp Miasma and hopefully experience it all over again.

A random memory popped into my head as I began writing this: when I was twelve or so, I had a Hebrew school teacher who would always respond the same way when students would say sorry to him:

“No, you’re not.”

If a student was talking when they shouldn’t have been and he told them to focus, they’d apologize and he’d refuse to accept their apology.

One day, a girl did something so disruptive that he sent her to the principal’s office. As she walked out of the room, he said, “I’m sorry I had to do this.”

She looked back at him, smiled, and said, “No, you’re not” and left before he had a chance to respond.

For a moment, this man—who was probably in his 40s—was stupefied. A twelve-year-old girl had just completely owned him, embarrassing him in front of his class with his own words.

God, I had such a huge crush on her.

Magic words aren’t actually magic

When we’re kids, we’re taught magic words like “Please” and “Thank you” and there is value in expressing gratitude towards other people when they do you favors, even if it’s something as simple as passing the salt.

But as adults, I think some of us have taken that message a little too strongly and actually do believe certain words (and tones) to be magic.

In a recent comment, Maria Cassano directed me towards an exchange she had with someone over on Substack.

In this exchange, a man pushes back against an article she wrote in which she uses planning children’s birthday parties as an example of unfair division of labor in households.

If you read through the discussion, you’ll notice that Maria includes actual research supporting her points with numbers and data while the dude (who identifies himself as a centrist — always a huge red flag) talks about his specific household and references another writer, who holds some very strange views.

But, gosh darn it, he’s just so nice and respectful!

Even as he says shit like this:

My wife and most of her friends enjoyed planning the kids’ birthday parties, and when we were getting married, my wife specifically asked me to let her plan the wedding. She had lots of details she wanted done in very specific ways.

Your wife telling you to stay out of the wedding planning is not the flex you think it is.

One of the issues is he’s of the belief that something you enjoy can’t count as work. That’s not the case.

I, for example, loved writing a romance novel with my best friend. It was a ton of fun and we’re both very proud of the result. It was probably also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

Similarly, I’ve run multiple marathons and loved doing it. It doesn’t mean preparing for them wasn’t work.

And work deserves recognition, one way or another.

It’s possible and even likely that his wife did enjoy planning the wedding. It also sounds a heck of a lot like she didn’t trust him to make decisions and believed his involvement would only make things more difficult.

But, I don’t know him or his wife. Maybe it’s possible that his wife loves planning weddings so much that she wanted to do all the preparation on her own and he lives in a household with a roughly even division of labor.

Even if it’s true, what does that have to do with anything?

Systemic gender disparities in our society are, well, systemic. Meaning you’ve got to use statistics to properly analyze them. As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote isn’t data and this guy proceeds to say such asinine things as

…we watch lots of true crime shows. When someone is murdered, it is often the partner who did it — but in many cases it’s a woman killing a man. I’m sure this is not the majority of cases, but women can pull a trigger just as easily as men can. I know many women who handle a gun quite well.

…Okay?

Again, I’m left wondering what point he’s even trying to make. If you want to talk murders, roughly 40% of female murder victims were killed by their intimate partner. The number is only about 5% for men and there’s reason to believe, in many of those cases, the women were acting in self-defense! In other words, that 5% likely keeps the 40% from being even higher.

More than that, however, this guy is doing the exact thing that Maria is calling out: he’s asking for free labor on her part.

Maria is a professional writer who is on the cusp of releasing her memoir. She not only gets paid for her writing, but she deserves it. This man insists that he’s engaging in a discussion — and I’m sure that’s how he sees it — but he’s also asking Maria to personally explain things he should already know while using her platform (as of this writing, she has nearly 2,000 Substack subscribers while he has fewer than 200) to spread his views.

And he expects to get all that for free.

He pretty much gives up the game in a post where he says:

Today I was reading a great article, but the author only put the first few paragraphs up. He put the rest of it behind a paywall.

He’s not saying he can’t afford it, by the way. He’s saying he refuses to pay on principle. Because he doesn’t value people’s writing.

Sorry — I wanted to read your work but I’m not paying you for the privilege.

No, you’re not.

Magic word asymmetry

The notion of magic words manifests itself in two ways, both of which are weaponized against marginalized people:

1. Bad people can say awful things so long as they say them the correct way
2. Good people can only say true things if they use the exact correct language (i.e. tone policing)

Anyone who’s been part of online discourse related to social justice issues has seen this kind of thing in action many times over.

Perhaps the best example of this is someone like Charlie Kirk, who would express heinous viewpoints dripping with Islamophobia, misogyny, and/or racism. People would defend his right to speak and express how wonderful it was to have a true free-speech absolutist only to turn around and try to get people fired when they expressed anything less than pure admiration for the man after he died.

I support free speech, too, but the magic word phenomenon creates a world with asymmetrically free speech, where the most hateful comments have protection while the most progressive, important, and, frankly, interesting speakers get censored.

Because there is no nice way to say that men are murdering women. Not when a feminist is saying it. Even cutesy games like, “Would you choose a man or a bear?” cause deep offense to the thin-skinned men of the internet.

Similarly, right now, there’s discourse over on TikTok surrounding a man who sent an absolutely batshit voice memo (discussed by Y.L. Wolfe here).

In the memo, the man tells a woman that he’s not interested in seeing her again unless she is going to have sex with him on the second date. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with expressing boundaries or checking with a potential partner for sexual compatibility.

But that’s not at all what’s going on here and I’m shocked to find people responding to this memo with insane takes such as one insisting that this is actually consent and the woman who received the voice memo is the one in the wrong because she violated the man when she posted the memo publicly.

To be clear: the view is that the man telling the woman she has to sleep with him or else is in the right because he’s “asking nicely,” but the woman calling it out and putting the bad behavior on display is in the wrong because “that’s now how you’re supposed to do things.”

Should she have posted the memo? I can see why it might make the man feel violated. At the same time, I’m sure if she didn’t post it, the argument would be that she’s completely making it up.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Home team advantage

The end result is that if you’re a woman, a queer person, a person of color, or a member of any other marginalized group, you’re at a major disadvantage when trying to air your grievances.

I can imagine a reply-guy piping in and saying I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, here. After all, they’re not saying that people need to censor their language, just that if they want to convince others of their views, they need to present said views in palatable ways. After all, you earn more flies with honey than vinegar (not actually true).

So, to you, I offer you a simple assignment. Come up with ways to express the following concepts in ways that are “correct” without diluting the messages:

• Men are dangerous to women
• We should believe victims when they come forward
• We should not give money to police departments if they’re going to murder innocent people (who are often people of color)
• Trans people should be allowed to safely use bathrooms in public
• There’s nothing wrong with being gay and it’s okay to teach that to children of all ages
• Abortions are often medical necessities and, even in cases where they’re not, women deserve the right to make their own decisions about their bodies

If you manage to do so, wonderful! Thank you! But, I expect, there is actually no way to express these views that is sufficiently “nice” so that people who don’t want to listen will change their minds.

Recently, on Reddit, somebody called me out for saying something ablest. I thought they were pretty rude about it, but you know what? They happened to be right. I apologized and deleted the comment.

And now that I’m thinking about it, it’s not so much that they were rude as they were direct.

It’s true that we live in a world and must, to a large extent, play by the rules. Maria handled that conversation extremely well and I’m marveled by her patience. But even as we play by the rules, it’s important to understand how those rules are stacked against us and designed to reinforce the very systems we’re fighting.

But, as for me, I’m going to do my best to be as direct as I can be. And if that comes off as rude or hurts your feelings, I’m sorry.

Actually, you know what? No, I’m not.

Nice is Different Than Good was originally published in Bitchy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I imagine every time a female feminist meets a supposed woke man, there’s a little Mulder and Scully in her head.

Scully reminds her that our society raises all men in a patriarchy and surrendering the privilege they’re born into is a difficult lifelong journey full of setbacks and even if they are actively working on themselves, they’re likely to have blindspots.

But then there’s Mulder saying, “But, Scully, maybe this one is a good one.”

After all, he’s saying all the right things, marches in all the right protests, and votes the right way. And, after all, you want to believe. No, you need to believe that there are good men out there.

I once heard the advice to never send a narcissist to therapy because you’ll just teach them a new language they can use to manipulate others. And, frankly, it feels the same way with men.

Men should listen to women and read feminist literature, but every tool is a weapon if you hold it right and we’ve all heard of cases of men using ideas like “sex positivity” to coerce their partners to do things they wouldn’t normally agree to. We’ve heard of men using their trauma as a means to gain sympathy and excuse their behavior. And, in the recent case of Graham Platner, we saw a man use progressive values as a kind of shield to hide what we’ve since seen is a very problematic view towards women.

Liz Plank writes about this in a recent Substack post. And, while nearly every line in it is a banger (I strongly recommend reading the whole thing), I’ll choose this quote to highlight:

A conservative man says something unsettling: red flag, next. A progressive man does something unsettling, and suddenly we’re out here with a magnifying glass and a corkboard, connecting strings, hunting for the innocent explanation.

What Plank doesn’t directly address, however, is the elephant in the room: she used to do a podcast with Justin Baldoni, a supposed male ally whose drama on the set of It Ends with Us became a fixation of mine.

I’d guess she doesn’t bring it up because either (a) she doesn’t want to get sued or (b) she wants to make the point that it is not just him and this is not the only time she’s been tricked.

Because Baldoni doesn’t undermine her point: he reinforces it.

And, frankly, as someone who strives to be a male ally, people like Baldoni and Platner really piss me off.

Because people like them make it extremely difficult to trust other men. And, I say that as a straight man. Straight women? Y’all end up living with men and sleeping next to them and it must sometimes feel like a ticking time bomb.

But this post isn’t for the ladies. It’s for the men. And I count myself among those men. Sometimes we write to convey information to other people, but oftentimes my writing serves as an attempt to piece together my own thoughts and convey information to myself.

It is very easy, when heinous details come out about another man, to point our fingers at him and identify him as one of the bad ones. It was almost a decade ago, for instance, when the Access Hollywood tape leaked and we heard the man who would be president brag about sexually assaulting women.

“Oh my God, can you believe what he said?”

“Well, now I really can’t vote for him.”

But the truth that every man knows — no matter how great of an ally he is — that we’ve let other men say such things unchallenged in private.

During #MeToo, it was easy to point at someone like Harvey Weinstein and say what an awful man he was, but much harder to look inward and think of times when we violated someone else’s consent to some degree.

The Graham Platner issue isn’t about the news that dropped this week. It’s about how we were acting a month ago when the New York Times first published reports of what they called “unsettling behavior.”

That particular article focused on the story of Lyndsey Fifield, whom Platner dated about five years ago and has connections to multiple conservative organizations. And that was enough for people online to accuse her of being an operative and lying.

I don’t think she’s lying. I didn’t think she was lying. But I also mostly kept my mouth shut when other people said she was, which is just as bad, in its own way.

We really need to reflect on this if we actually care about not putting rapists in power in our government. A Vlogger I absolutely adore, Rebecca Watson, put it best at the end of her recent YouTube video on the topic:

…you are the reason that Racicot did not want to come forward. And you are the reason why she eventually had to, and that should disgust you as much as it disgusts me. And all of you should grapple with the fact that if Jenny Racicot had been a conservative, or if she hadn’t told a friend what happened, you’d be calling her a lying bitch, too.

To be clear — I had a hard time remembering which name belonged to whom in the story — Fifield was the conservative and people used that as an excuse not to believe her. And we’re only able to accept Racicot’s story because she’s about as close to the perfect victim as women get in incidents like these.

Even still, I saw someone over on Threads trying to poke holes in her narrative:

𝗣𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗡𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗶 (@mynameispeeeeeter) on Threads

He claims to just be asking questions about the journalistic process — and, to his point, there are ways in which the media completely botched this story — but each of these questions serves to undermine the Racicot’s credibility.

He’s also very misleading about some of his points.

He talks about messages not recovered or reviewed by Politico. That’s because Racicot deleted them.

He also mentions the distinction between corroborating someone making an accusation and the accusation being true. Okay, sure, but it’s a distinction without a difference in this case.

For the sake of argument, let’s humor the idea that Racicot is making this up. For her to do that, she’d need to go back in time and tell a friend that Platner assaulted her before he even announced his candidacy. Are we to believe that she made this false accusation just in case someday she needed to use it against him? And then waited until less than a month before the primaries to come forward with them?

Whatever problems one may have with Politico’s reporting in general, their article did a particularly good job of explaining how they performed their background research and what evidence they based their conclusions on.

If there’s one thing that I’d like men to take away from this article, it’s that we need to do a better job of listening to women.

This isn’t a particularly profound thing to say and Lord knows women have been telling us this for forever, but the message still hasn’t sunk in.

And, admittedly, “listening to women” when you’ve been socialized not to can actually be harder than it seems (it’s one of those things that’s simple, but not necessarily easy).

As I was finishing up this piece, I saw that Ossiana Tepfenhart just posted an article with a similar topic:

Here’s The Ugly Truth On Why Most Women Don’t Trust Male Feminists

As part of the article, Tepfenhart brings up instances where men invaded women’s spaces and, in the comments, a man points out that maybe male feminists need their own spaces, too.

He’s not wrong and I’m even willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume he’s not actively trolling. He probably believes he’s contributing to the conversation.

But he’s doing exactly what the article is calling out: he’s attempting to shift the conversation away from the topic at hand. He’s lessening men’s shitty behavior by suggesting that maybe men are only doing these things because they need their own spaces, too.

The allies’ job is to amplify the voices of the marginalized. That doesn’t mean we can’t have our own ideas or think for ourselves, but doing so requires a great deal of introspection.

Yes, by all means, comment on women’s articles (after all, comments help with engagement), but unless it’s a simple response like, “Great post!” I urge you to really internalize what these articles are saying before you attempt to respond to them. Because, nine times out of ten, when a man responds to a woman’s article on feminism, it’s into roughly one of three categories:

1. Mansplaining/arguing
2. Repeating what the article already said, often in much fewer words
3. Trying to divert the conversation

If you’re doing one of those three things, I promise you: you aren’t listening.

And you’re being a shitty ally.

Listen Up, Men was originally published in Bitchy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Graham Platner is, to put it mildly, a strange, strange man.

Running to replace Susan Collins in the Maine senate seat, his first major controversy involved him having a Nazi tattoo across his chest. Okay, but he claims not to have known it was a Nazi symbol, despite referring to it as a totenkopf, but whatever, I guess we can buy the story of getting a tattoo while in the military and thinking a skull and crossbones looked cool.

And, full disclosure, I was unfamiliar with the symbol despite growing up in a Jewish household, the grandson of Holocaust deniers, and attending Hebrew school until my Bar Mitzvah at 13. It’s not like it was a swastika, right?

There were also the Reddit posts, which are pretty bad but, let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t want our Reddit posts from over a decade ago shared and associated with ourselves. I thought his response was somewhat reasonable:

I look back now and I don’t mean to be flippant, but it was just dumb stuff on the internet, and when I stopped being lonely and isolated I didn’t use that as an outlet anymore.

Then there were the sexts and, along with them, one of the weirdest statements I’ve ever heard in my life:

He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” [an ex-girlfriend] recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”

There is so much to unpack there, starting with my first question, which is how, exactly, does that work?

I may not understand people who keep a shotgun under their bed in case there’s an intruder, but I at least can piece together how they could use said weapon as a deterrent.

But raping a house burglar? More than almost anything else, I’m trying to figure out how that would even work mechanically.

And why would he say that to his girlfriend? Is that supposed to make her feel safer?

Yet despite all of this being out there, Platner had good, strong policies including abolishing ICE, investigating Trump, supporting the LGBTQ+ community, and fighting for universal health care.

In addition to having good positions, his opposition in the primaries was 78-year-old Janet Mills, who failed to offer much of a threat and, despite the Democratic party’s best efforts, he sailed to an easy victory.

And that brings us to this week when a woman publicly accusing Platner of raping her in 2021 became a top story.

This, by the way, is not new news. The New York Times published the account over a month ago, but what is new is an interview in Politico where she goes into further detail.

Platner denies her claims, but false claims of sexual assault are extremely rare and his campaign sure isn’t acting like they’re false. As of right now, it looks like there’s a strong possibility he’s going to drop out of the race. And he has about a week to decide if he’s going to or not.

I’m not so much interested in the specific accusations as I am in expressing my frustration at men like Platner who clearly have a big vision for what America can be—I’m not cynical enough to believe he endorsed strong leftist values just to get elected—but prevent that vision from coming to pass by insisting on being the ones to make it happen.

To offer up a slightly different example, you have someone like Tom Steyer, who spent $216 million of his own money in order to come in third during the California primaries for governor.

Tom Steyer, for those who don’t know, is a billionaire who also ran for president in 2020 only to lose miserably. Unlike other billionaires, he believes that billionaires should be taxed higher and also, generally, endorses leftist principles.

But, aside from being a billionaire, he has the charisma of a rotting piece of wood.

Instead of giving his $260 million to someone with similar views, but who also had a chance of winning, he essentially threw his money away and, more importantly, destroyed any chance of California electing a progressive governor.

I have to imagine this is ego.

When Elizabeth Warren ran for president — the same year as Steyer, by the way — her slogan was “I’ve got a plan for that.”

On her website, you could find detailed policies that she and her team came up with to, for instance, offer universal healthcare to Americans.

I can’t find the link, but I distinctly remember an interview where the reporter asked her what she would do if another candidate “stole” her plans and implemented them.

“Good,” she said. “I hope they do.”

(Spoiler Alert: They did not)

But again and again, we see these men run for office who end up jeopardizing their causes and their legacies as a result of their insistence that they be the one to do what they’re promising.

We saw it with Joe Biden in 2024, when he waited forever to pass the torch for Kamala Harris, leaving her with a scant 107 days to build (and ultimately lose) a campaign. He’s lucky that, in 2020, the accusations against him didn’t become a bigger story.

Eric Swalwell, also one of the nominees in the recent California governor elections, dropped out after sexual assault allegations came out.

My point is not that Platner shouldn’t have assaulted that woman — although obviously he shouldn’t have — it’s that he should have had the humility to have known about his past, recognized that he’d done heinous acts that could cost him the election, and use his power to support someone else in the same role.

There are plenty of reasons to be supporting female candidates in elections, but I do think Platner and Swalwell offer a reminder that there’s a strategic reason for it, too:

It seems to me that male politicians are often a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. I’m not suggesting that every man is a rapist or every man engages in extra-marital affairs, but it would seem to me that the kind of narcissism that leads a man into politics probably leads to a greater likelihood of that kind of behavior.

When I say that men are a liability, I don’t mean to suggest that all men are inherently bad. Many men are wonderful. Platner said many wonderful things that I agree with. I think, in that sense, he very well may have made a fantastic senator. Especially if he replaced Susan Collins.

What I mean can best be represented by a term used in feminist circles: Schrödinger’s Rapist.

In brief, it’s the idea that you can’t tell who is or isn’t a rapist just by looking at them. Virtually every man has the potential of being one. And, frankly, it can take women a lot of time with a man to determine that they’re safe.

One of my weaknesses as a writer is I always struggle with conclusions. I think I’ve said everything I need to say here and don’t have a solid way to tie these ideas all up in a nice little package at the end.

Nor do I want to.

But I guess if I had to summarize my point, it’s that men either need to learn, from an early age, that their actions have consequences and they need to behave themselves. Or, if they’re not willing to do that, pass the torch to someone else before they ruin it for the rest of us.

I was in a mood today, tired from staring at my computer monitor, and stepped out of my office to go for a walk.

As I walked, I walked past a grassy area with yellow tape surrounding it along with “No Trespassing” signs. I don’t know who owns the land there, but whoever it is, they decided it was preferable to cover it with eyesores rather than let a single person step foot on it.

I continued through a parking lot with similar signs warning me that I wasn’t allowed to leave my car there unless I was a customer. Violators would be towed.

Think about that.

If all I wanted was to leave my car there for a little bit, they would take time out of their busy day to call a tow truck over and move my car somewhere else. They might argue there’s only so much space in their parking lot and they need to reserve it for customers, but towing companies never seem to run out of space in their lots. There’s always room to tow away another car.

We live in a capitalist world and it’s very rare to find somewhere to just exist without someone charging money for it or telling you to leave.

It’s why I felt something of a relief when I made it to my destination: a local library.

I love libraries. Part of this is because I love books, but that’s not the only reason. Libraries, more than anywhere else, feel like an escape from all the worst qualities of the world around us.

As I walked inside, I saw Covid tests sitting on a counter. You could just take one. Or two. Or however many you need.

What happens if somebody takes more than their fair share?

I don’t know, but judging from the supply, that hasn’t happened. Libraries trust and respect people enough to let them decide for themselves.

There were places to sit down and, I suppose, read, but I didn’t have to. I could play on my phone or listen to music or do more or less whatever I want so long as it wasn’t bothering other guests.

I often do private tutoring in libraries. My students pay me and the library lets me use their space to conduct business without demanding a percentage of the cut. I can’t think of anywhere else I could go. The closest thing is a coffee shop, but they would ask me to buy a drink or leave.

Of course, libraries have books, too. An awful lot of books. And if they don’t have the one book you want, they have a handful of ways for you to get it. They can bring it in from another library in the system or even one out of the system through Interlibrary Loans. You can also often ask them to add titles to their collection.

One library near me, in fact, will order a book from Amazon if they don’t have it, and ship it directly to your house. At no cost. They ask that you return it in three weeks. What happens if you don’t? Well, they may not let you check out another book this way.

Like I noted with the Covid tests, there’s a lot of trust that the library gives you. They let you take their books home with you and hold onto them for quite a while. Up to nine weeks at a time, with renewals. Many libraries may issue a slight fine if you don’t return the book when they ask you to, but more and more libraries — including the ones near me — are switching to a no fines system.

Again, you can just trust people to not take advantage of your policies and, for the most part, they won’t. And, if they do, the system is big enough that it can handle a few bad eggs.

There’s been a lot of talk in the media about Democratic Socialists winning elections. The most prominent are perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani, but others such as Melat Kiros, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez also had recent electoral victories.

Critics like to point to the Soviet Union as what happens when your country becomes socialist and I’m not enough of a historian to know if socialism was the main factor to its collapse or not.

What I do know is we’re living in a capitalistic country and it’s not working out so well for me or many of the people I see around me or, for that matter, the people with money.

Elon Musk briefly became a trillionaire. He has more than twice as much net worth as the next richest person in the world. And, I dunno, he doesn’t seem to be very happy.

But the other night I went to the library and checked out a couple of comic books (Saga, by Brian K. Vaughn Fiona Staples, which I cannot recommend enough).

The librarian told me that he wasn’t the biggest fan of the series and then proceeded to recommend about half a dozen other comic books that he liked better. This was not in the way that sometimes snooty fans can be, where they look down on everybody else’s pedestrian taste. This was him expressing a pure enthusiasm for the medium and excited that he could share his thoughts with someone who was eager to listen.

It was a genuine interaction between two people and, at least for me, it was about more than comic books.

It served as a reminder that the truest form of joy is connection with the people around us. Capitalism wants us to believe that the only way to find happiness is through material goods.

Don’t get me wrong: material things can be great.

But I bet it’s been decades since Elon Musk felt that kind of connection with someone, if he’s ever felt it at all.

Politicians often treat socialism as a dirty word, but I don’t think it is. Humans are social animals and we have the technology and means to make the world better for everybody.

I have a memory from the time I was at UT Austin. I was taking the escalator up to class and there was a young woman who was stuck at the top.

Her shoelace got caught in the machinery and she couldn’t move.

Other students moved around her — they had to get to class, I guess — but I saw she needed help so I stopped. I asked if she had any personal attachment to the shoelace and she told me no, so I took out a key and cut her loose.

I don’t share this moment to make myself look like a hero. Instead, I’m letting you know because this is a moment in my life that made me very happy. Someone needed my help and I helped them.

It felt so good that I still remember it more than 10 years later.

In this story, the other people who ignored her represent what capitalism does to us. It makes us so focused on ourselves and our needs that we can’t spare the two seconds it would take to help the people around us.

I’m not trying to suggest they were bad people, only that they had the opportunity to do something good and they declined.

Here’s another thing you should know about Elon Musk, the one-time trillionaire:

He is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I don’t think anyone deserves a trillion dollars, but it’s certainly not him.

Imagine if we lived in a society that rewarded good deeds instead of greed. Imagine a world where the competition was to see who could do the most good instead of who could exploit the most people.

This doesn’t seem impossible. After all, even a dog can be trained, why can’t people?

We give kindergarteners gold stars for sharing and doing well in school, but at some point along the way, we tell them that the good feeling should be their own reward.

And that’s, to a large extent, true.

But good deeds don’t pay rent.

Think of jobs that help make the world better. There are a handful that pay pretty well (doctor comes to mind), but most are known for their low salaries.

Now think of jobs that make the world a worse place. How much do they make?

And how does that make sense?

There are tiny pockets of the world, like libraries, where I can see the potential of a society that values the act of humanizing those around us. Socialism is the belief that we not only need more of those places, but that we can have them.