Real men (still) don't eat quiche
November 4, 2017 3:33 AM   Subscribe

J. Saxena (previously) on gender in food trends and marketing: Women Aren't Ruining Food and Are Men OK? No really, are they OK?
posted by progosk (119 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
“I don’t feel society necessarily discriminates against me. What it does is say, ‘I don’t have a voice,’” Hafer says of America’s current attitude toward men.

Yoinks. Way to nullify any mild amusement value associated with your product, dude.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 4:15 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


because there’s been a backlash against traditional gender roles in the United States, and it’s almost made masculinity, especially caucasian masculinity—we’ve been able to say we’re discriminated against to a certain degree.”

I mean, you can say it, but it doesn’t make it true. (This quote was from a guy who was sad that people at cafes didn’t want to hear his libertarian rants so he opened a tits-and-guns cafe, by the way.)
posted by uncleozzy at 4:28 AM on November 4, 2017 [53 favorites]


I am not in the dating world and if anything happened to Mr. Roquette, I’m done with all that.
That said, if I were a young woman, soap in an ammo box, ‘manly’ coffee or ‘tactical’ shampoos or calling shampoo ‘manpoo’ would give me a horrible case of the giggles.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:52 AM on November 4, 2017 [25 favorites]


I think a lot of people have forgotten (or never knew) the real lesson of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, which is summed up in its last line: "Real me DO eat quiche, because real men don't care"
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:01 AM on November 4, 2017 [49 favorites]


I don't know, though. It seems to me like caring is fine. If quiche sits weird with your gender, okay, don't eat it. Just don't insist that everyone else has to care in the same way, or denigrate them when they don't.

Like, it's just as valid for Masculine Manly Men to care about their gender presentation as anyone else. If I love kinda-androgynous scents because they make me feel kinda-androgynous, then these dudes have every right to love Tactical Odor Support Products because they make them feel ruggedly butch as fuck. If "ruggedly butch as fuck" is your fave gender then products that back that up are fucking lovely and you should rock on with that. Just don't be a jerk about it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:07 AM on November 4, 2017 [73 favorites]


For me, it comes down to the fact that way too many people working in marketing and PR have skeevy, diseased minds and have created several millennia's worth of people living in constant, gnawing terror that they are not seen as enough of whatever they believe themselves to be, because nothing sells like aspirational fear.

It's 2017 and we still have people who believe in this crap. Sheesh. Hell, I look like the love child of a lumberjack and an overall-wearing plumber most of the time, I drive a huge old pickup truck, work in the building trades, and it doesn't bother me in the least that I get funny looks on the worksite over my Petticoat Junction lunchbox or that mean bartenders roll their eyes when I order my usual Shirley Temple with an extra cherry.

To each their own, I suppose, but I look forward to the day when people are less inclined to cosplay their lives according to a tired old playbook and more free to make choices based on what they actually like and not what the backroom tastemakers and comedians of the world have dubbed acceptable or unacceptable this year.
posted by sonascope at 5:20 AM on November 4, 2017 [94 favorites]


Though it occurs to me that I'm probably in a weirdly privileged position that "It's okay to be ruggedly masculine too" feels like a thing that needs saying at all. I sometimes describe my social circle and like the Davis Square trans community in general as The Island of Trans Lesbian Furries, and yeah okay living on The Island is kinda difficult for the few trans guys I know in the area who do have to put up with a lot of "masculinity is Bad and Wrong," but probably us Islanders are so outnumbered by people like sonascope's bartender that it's not even really necessary to raise the "masculinity is okay too!" flag.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:25 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


They're marketing to insecurity--not a new concept.
Both companies use self-deprecating copy, almost negging men into buying better products for themselves.
Exactly.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:26 AM on November 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


Jokey intimidation is a tactic many of these companies use, but really their goal is quite serious. “Women have had quality body care figured out for a while,” Ryan Bodenheimer of Manpoo told the Daily Dot over email, but quality hair products isn’t something men have been told to want. “We want to change the way men think.”

It's using gender essentialism in the name of humiliating the customer into obedience:

SHAME: The Secret Tool of Marketing

There is a decades-old fear--a real thing, I think--in American men of losing something. Whether that was misogynistic privilege, or a better-defined (real or imagined; and for better or worse) sense of place. This sort of marketing exploits both that, and a gender divide, in parallel to timeless tactics of pitting people against each other. Only it's not to any particularly nefarious end--it's just to sell crap at higher prices than people need.

The nefariousness is in the means.
posted by pykrete jungle at 5:31 AM on November 4, 2017 [15 favorites]


Like, it's just as valid for Masculine Manly Men to care about their gender presentation as anyone else.

Yes, but... the problem comes when a few gender presentations are elevated, which they are, almost without exception. For myself, as a kind of sloppy rumpled masculine-presenting cis white American man, I really appreciate people who are high-performers gender-wise — ultra masculine, super-butch, fiercely femme, dandies across the spectrum — but I remain acutely aware of the performers who endanger themselves by flying their most authentic colors. The worst your hyper-masculine cami-soap-washing Guy is going to get is an eye roll, which is not even on the board compared to the trans man dandy or even the butch het cis woman face just going outside.

So it is just as valid, but if he expects me to give a fuck, he needs to recognize that I only have so many fucks to give, and he’s pretty far down on my fuck-giving priority list.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:36 AM on November 4, 2017 [74 favorites]


“tactical” soap
Is this real life?
posted by thelonius at 5:40 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thank goodness I am and always have been just a bit unreal. (and I don't just eat but make a pretty killer quiche)
posted by sammyo at 5:42 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


They are not, as their ads frequently note, for women, or “metrosexuals,”

They are most definitely aimed squarely at a demographic that is of a metrosexual nature. I'm sure the word has been around long enough that it's become taken as an insult by now, but it still has a meaning too and if there's a newer preferred term I don't know it. If you're a man who's into "premium detergent meticulously crafted to fit the modern man", if you want your shampoo to have a brand identity that aligns with your lifestyle, you are, in that aspect of your life at least, "metrosexual" by definition.

There's no law of nature that says you can't be metrosexual even if you also like "guns and women in American flag bikinis" and eat only blazin-'hot Jeremy-Clarkson-approved petrol-flavoured quiche. There are metrosexual truck drivers, metrosexual chainsaw operators, even metrosexual roughnecks. They deserve our respect, and have just as much right as the rest of us to have a laundry detergent designed to meet their specific needs and desires.

Although I wonder if some day we might evolve as a society to the point where we don't need to have specialized "metrosexual libertarian" cafes, and these guys can come to feel welcome in any average Starbucks.
posted by sfenders at 5:42 AM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


Great minds...

Oh, and also:

“I don’t feel society necessarily discriminates against me. What it does is say, ‘I don’t have a voice,’” Hafer says of America’s current attitude toward men. “I don’t have an opinion because we’ve been in charge of the country for 200 years or whatever.”

As Saxena points out, this is a blindness to the way in which non-gender-specific marketing and product design has in the past reflected male perspectives,* and how a movement to actually non-gendered marketing and design feels like a loss.

But I also think it's sad that "having a voice" means "buying shit." I often feel like the commercial explosion of "nerd culture" is partially that--a display of identity through commercialism. Like a sports team, or picking a side between Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.

Subcultures have often latched onto aspects of commercial and pop culture as a way to gently affirm identity and community (see the Babadook, more recently, but examples abound in decades past). But now plurality and majority cultures are being told they must buy to assert their identities, too. It's White History Month, as brought to you by Madison Avenue.

It's to the point where this Mitchell and Webb sketch almost doesn't work anymore.

*(An aside: for some reason I got a J. Peterman catalog in the mail, and while I unironically enjoy reading it, the way it revels in a very specific and *insistent* (older, male, rich, preppy, and implicitly white) narrative voice)
posted by pykrete jungle at 5:45 AM on November 4, 2017 [12 favorites]


I think there could be a market niche for bone-shaped hairclips for paleo/carnicore bros who wear man buns.
posted by acb at 5:49 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


This feels very alien to me as someone from a country that draws its manliness boundaries in a different place. The idea that men don't eat quiche or yoghurt is bizarre, as is eating a salad while laughing, but then there's certain beers I would not expect a woman to drink even though there's no reason to come to this conclusion other than the advertising used.
posted by Merus at 5:54 AM on November 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


They are most definitely aimed squarely at a demographic that is of a metrosexual nature. I'm sure the word has been around long enough that it's become taken as an insult by now, but it still has a meaning too and if there's a newer preferred term I don't know it. If you're a man who's into "premium detergent meticulously crafted to fit the modern man", if you want your shampoo to have a brand identity that aligns with your lifestyle, you are, in that aspect of your life at least, "metrosexual" by definition.

sfenders, I tend to think of "metrosexual" as meaning not just "exacting in lifestyle," but also to mean "non-rugged," "city-oriented," etc. So my impression is that this hyper-masculine marketing is geared towards men who would explicitly reject the idea of being "metrosexual." I don't think it's a law of nature, just how the term seems to have been used in my experience.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to present one's self and gender identity however one wishes; what's so wring is that (1) this should need to happen by advertising that denigrates other presentations, and (2) that buying more superficially differentiated stuff (painting the same product pink, or matte black) is the path to self-expression, as opposed to, say, buying a product that fits your body or your activities.
posted by pykrete jungle at 5:56 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Maybe the problem with quiche actually is it's branding. Quiche is French so immediately suspect, but really it's just an omelet pie, so just call it that, or if omelet is also too French then just go with egg pie. What red-blooded American doesn't like eggs or pie?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:00 AM on November 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


Also, on the topic of pie, if you like Japanese curry you should try putting it in a pie crust to make curry pie. It's really good.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:03 AM on November 4, 2017 [13 favorites]


I used to work at a health food store in a small rural town. We mostly had regular customers (this was such a Mayberry experience, we let regulars buy on credit, recorded on a scrap of paper under the register) and there were a few husband/wife couples where the man just refused to enter the store, ever, for any reason. It was a small store, so if he had anything to tell his wife, he could just shout it from the threshold. But actually entering a store where tofu was sold was unpossible. We kept a little cafe table and chair out front on the sidewalk for these dudes, so they could be comfortable while protecting their fragile masculinity.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:06 AM on November 4, 2017 [85 favorites]


All of this is just No Homo marketing, aimed at men who might want to eat quiche or use exfoliants but are afraid it'll make them want to suck dick. As such then it's payback for decades of pink washing everything from powertools to cars if it's aimed at women.

At its most extreme, it leads to not wanting to wipe down there because touching your butthole is a little bit too gay for some.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:10 AM on November 4, 2017 [38 favorites]


any portmanteau in a storm: really it's just an omelet pie, so just call it that, or if omelet is also too French then just go with egg pie. What red-blooded American doesn't like eggs or pie?

Going by the Wikipedia article about the original book, that's an explicit argument the book makes, but perhaps with more of a straight face. See also the age-old arguments about uncommon words for colors being unmasculine/"gay", regardless of whether the colors themselves are.
posted by InTheYear2017 at 6:15 AM on November 4, 2017


My brother buys all of these things. He's the target demo. He was probably one of the first people to buy that men's bodywash with the special included gunmetal colored men's loofah for men's bodies.

He also has a nice little suburban house as a single 28 year old man and searches Pinterest for mason jar craft hacks, which he's placed all over his home. He decorates for Christmas and says things like I really like how this lamp brightens up this space.

He's the target demo because he's a domesticated consumer whore who also happens to like guns and pick up trucks.
posted by phunniemee at 6:17 AM on November 4, 2017 [28 favorites]


(One of the mason jars is for shell casings.)
posted by phunniemee at 6:20 AM on November 4, 2017 [32 favorites]


At its most extreme, it leads to not wanting to wipe down there because touching your butthole is a little bit too gay for some.

I probably don't want to know the answer to this, but is this actually a thing, or just a funny thought?

It's sort of funny (and a bit sad) that it takes labeling things as "tactical" or ultra manly to make many men comfortable with accessorizing, decorating, and buying grooming products. It's like how lots of American men would never dream of buying and wearing jewelry, but see no contradiction in collecting and wearing expensive watches -- adding a mechanical component and careful branding makes it ok, apparently.

It's not unique to the US, but the US does take it too far. In many other countries, men dress and groom with care and don't feel like their masculinity is at risk, but here it can seem like doing more than wearing an old t-shirt and cargo shorts represents a major masculine incident.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:23 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


On the subject of Real Men eating quiche:

As others have noted above, yes, people should be able to assert the level and type of masculinity/femininity they want to, in the way they want to--but not to the extent that it implicitly denigrates or degrades others'.

And the need to assert a lot of hyper-masculinity so loudly often isn't a flourishing of self-expression, it's born of fear and insecurity. Which is why I think it's completely useful for self-identifying masculine men to confidently model *as masculine* traits like tolerance, deference, and empathy--with the crucial point that these are not *exclusively* masculine values.

Insecure boys (and insecure men, and, frankly anyone) who crave(s) a masculine identity need to see these universal values with a masculine spin on them, because otherwise their absence becomes part of their identity.

In the same way that it's great and probably necessary for self-identifying feminine women to model *as feminine* traits like strength, technical ability, and assertiveness.

Yes, these are all virtues (for lack of a better word) that should flourish without regard to gender, but for someone looking for a tribe, they need to be exemplified as traits of that tribe.

Most nations have a history of struggling against diversity, but most modern nations today express it as a national virtue. This is something that is consciously achieved--it had to be built into the national fabric--and while it needs to be furthered a great deal in pretty much every nation, it can only really be furthered by tying it to other aspects of that nation's character.
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:29 AM on November 4, 2017 [11 favorites]


All of this is just No Homo marketing, aimed at men who might want to eat quiche or use exfoliants but are afraid it'll make them want to suck dick. As such then it's payback for decades of pink washing everything from powertools to cars if it's aimed at women.
I get that listening to women is hard, but did you read the first link? The whole fucking point is that "the backlash against [rosé] underscores a sad but not unexpected assumption when it comes to food trends (and really, all trends): When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it." This is because gender is hierarchical, and masculinity is valued and respected, while femininity is denigrated. Tactical man-things aren't going to ruin anything, because they're supposed to elevate things that are associated with women and therefore come pre-ruined.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:36 AM on November 4, 2017 [36 favorites]


“One exudes masculine traits and one exudes feminine traits,

If anybody's exuding anything you're gonna want to get a paper towel right quick and clean it up before it stains something.

and we have several hundred thousands of years of evolution to back that up.”

I. . . . whuh. . . .huff. . . . that's . . . just not how evolution works, dude.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:44 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


This type of marketing is problematic for the reasons already mentioned, but it also seems to me that a lot of these gendered products are horribly overpriced. I guess making money off of people’s insecurities is nothing new, though.

And Manpoo does not sound like something I would want to put in my hair, or anyplace else on my body.
posted by TedW at 6:55 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


Rosé, in case you hadn’t heard, is ruined.

Pink wine has always been controversial in one way or another. Back when people called it white zinfandel it was known as a gateway wine. That is, what you drank when you were first approaching wine, because it was safe - that is, you were unlikely to get a bottle of white zinfandel that didn't taste good, and the variety of flavors was relatively small, and it was sugary sweet, like a wine cooler. But wine is snobby business, so if you didn't progress to wines unpolluted by sweetener you were labeled a hopeless rube. Hence the only piece of SF Fisherman's Wharf schwag I ever considered buying: a sweater that said "Friends Don't Let Friends Drink White Zinfandel." (My parents loved the stuff. They have since moved on but still lack the capacity to discern good wine from bad.)

A couple of years ago some millennial friends were drinking rosé and, because I didn't want to be an ass, I had a glass, and it was really good. Gone was the sickly sweetness of Behringer's swill - this was quality stuff. So it makes sense that it had a comeback, and also that people got sick of it being everywhere after a while, especially with the reintroduction of sugar. The internet doesn't help. #HashtagsRuinEverything

But thankfully for everyone who doesn't depend on the latest trend to determine what they eat and drink, good rosé is here to stay and can be enjoyed regardless of what is trending on Twitter.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:55 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


When a feminist sees that women pay more for the same product than men do, they conclude that women are paying too much. When a capitalist sees that men are paying less than women for the same product, they conclude that men are paying too little.
posted by clawsoon at 7:03 AM on November 4, 2017 [33 favorites]


Like, it's just as valid for Masculine Manly Men to care about their gender presentation as anyone else.

IMO, making a variety of aesthetics for a product is good but attaching a gendered label is alienating for gender-nonconforming people. Adjectives like rugged, tactical, cute, lovely, etc... are great and specific and not explicitly gendered. And so the performance-conscious can just gravitate towards the thing that suits them. But to say “here’s our product FOR MEN” is now stating “men like this thing, and if you like it, you’re like a man.” Which perpetuates arbitrary gender roles, and would be discomforting for say, a butch trans woman or outdoorsy agender person who wants to be “rugged/tactical/practical/etc” but recoils at the labels of man/manly/masculine.
posted by alexlaw at 7:08 AM on November 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


a lot of these gendered products are horribly overpriced

This is the purpose of marketing these products in this way. The process of market segmentation is that you identify a sub-group of consumers who are capable of paying more than the price of the generic product, and then persuade them (through product design, advertising, and other marketing strategies) that they need, or want, or deserve, the more expensive brand, or that they will suffer in some way if they buy the cheaper brand. (Think of the marketers as a pack of wolves trying to cut out the weakest members of the herd of consumers.)

Segmentation by gender is one of the easiest and most prevalent forms of market segmentation (think of clothing, where nearly all products are segmented by gender, often needlessly): we are already so bombarded with messages about gender and its presentation that it is very easy to introduce new products that take advantage of the existing stream of propaganda.
posted by cyanistes at 7:10 AM on November 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


I like the idea of a bit more variation available in how I can make my clean, freshly-laundered underpants smell, but the whole concept kind of went downhill once the various marketeers and proponents opened their mouths. (FWIW I also like the way some perfume intended for women smells on me).
posted by aesop at 7:13 AM on November 4, 2017


At its most extreme, it leads to not wanting to wipe down there because touching your butthole is a little bit too gay for some.

Septic masculinity
posted by acb at 7:21 AM on November 4, 2017 [16 favorites]


When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it.

This is also a very succinct summary of the experience of being a woman in a fandom that has a large dude contingent (comics, Star Wars/Trek, Doctor Who). Women always ruin fandom by doing it wrong. And woe betide you if you're a teenaged or young woman, you're doing it so wrong that it's often necessary to bow up the whole fandom in order to cleanse it of your taint.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:23 AM on November 4, 2017 [37 favorites]


FTA:
[H]e was peeved that “the entire laundry industry seemed geared towards women.” He figured it was time for detergent to be a man-centered product too, so men aren’t stuck washing “all our clothing in a blue goo that hasn’t seen a formulation update in decades” and, most importantly, “is tailored towards the opposite sex.”
I mean. OK. But this is the detergent I, a woman, use and it has like a big strong arm holding a hammer and everything. I, too, am peeved that men don't do enough laundry, but let's not act like it was a product that's been holding them back.

My view of the white cis-het male backlash of the past few years is that they're finally getting a sense of what it is to be seen and treated through race/gender lenses and THEY DON'T LIKE IT (duh, who does), but instead of taking the step to say 'I get what other folks have been saying now,' it instead turns to this 'silenced all my life/we're the ONLY ONES who get discriminated against now!' nonsense.
posted by palindromic at 7:31 AM on November 4, 2017 [76 favorites]


At its most extreme, it leads to not wanting to wipe down there because touching your butthole is a little bit too gay for some.

Good Lord. It's a job of work. It needs to be done! Get on with it. That's as manly as it gets.
posted by thelonius at 7:33 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is also a very succinct summary of the experience of being a woman in a fandom that has a large dude contingent (comics, Star Wars/Trek, Doctor Who). Women always ruin fandom by doing it wrong.
Right. Because, as Saxena argues, it's acceptable for dudes to obsess about serious dudely things. But when women obsess about things that are coded female, we're frivolous and high-maintenance, and when men obsess about womanly things, they're pathetic and unmanly. So it's really important to dudes to police the gender boundaries of their interests. And that puts women in this shitty bind where we can escape the frivolous, high-maintenance label by getting interested in things that are coded male, but we're never truly going to be accepted, because if we were, then it would challenge the maleness and hence the status of those things. Hence the whole "fake geek girl," "casual gamer girl" bullshit where it's impossible for us to prove that we belong, because if we do belong, then the whole enterprise gets devalued.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:43 AM on November 4, 2017 [43 favorites]


I like the idea that you can masculinize and monetize anything by adding the word "tactical" in front of it. This bodes well for my entirely theoretical line of tactical crinolines, for manly men who feel that they've been left out of the tulle game for entirely too long.
posted by thivaia at 7:43 AM on November 4, 2017 [64 favorites]


We just had a baby, and even the baby products that parents use are sold this way! “Tactical” baby carriers vs “womanly” baby wraps. Pink and blue bottles, diaper pails, yadda yadda.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 7:47 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


We kept a little cafe table and chair out front on the sidewalk for these dudes, so they could be comfortable while protecting their fragile masculinity.

I can second this. I worked at Whole Foods in Dallas in the early 90’s when it was still only 6 stores in Texas.

Menly.Men.didnt.shop.there.

I took it upon myself as a fey boy at the time to make them feel safe coming inside.

It was like convincing a beaten dog that the food in your hand was safe to eat.

I feel bad for men mostly. I wish them Fashion and Interesting silhouettes and Good Hair products because testosterone makes a head greasy yo.
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:53 AM on November 4, 2017 [21 favorites]


This bodes well for my entirely theoretical line of tactical crinolines

Maybe market them as “Camolines?”
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:56 AM on November 4, 2017 [32 favorites]


Annika Cicada: I took it upon myself as a fey boy at the time to make them feel safe coming inside.

Heh. I'm sure you realize now the gender panic you must've created.
posted by clawsoon at 7:57 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Which perpetuates arbitrary gender roles, and would be discomforting for say, a butch trans woman or outdoorsy agender person who wants to be “rugged/tactical/practical/etc” but recoils at the labels of man/manly/masculine.

As a nonbinary trans person who has to be a binary woman just to get by I appreciate this level of care but I honestly have given up on this ever changing because binary genders just gotta binary gender the whole damn world it seems. So I gave up trying to fight it because shit life is short and I gotta feed and clothe myself.
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:59 AM on November 4, 2017 [14 favorites]


I remember when the original "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" first came out. In hindsight, it seems to have been an early prototype for the type of conspiracy-laden rhetoric surrounding gender roles that we now hear issuing from right-wing commentators with depressing regularity. The idea is that in this complicated post-industrial media-soaked (i.e. "fallen") world, men have lost touch with their own essential nature without even knowing it. They've been domesticated, and hence feminized. Or maybe vice versa? In any case, back in the day we had men, John Wayne-style unapologetic men. And the men today have forgotten how to be that. My god, some of them are actually eating QUICHE, if you can imagine.

Now...at the time, quiche was NOT a feminine coded foodstuff. That was a necessary precondition for the "joke" of the book to work: that a food which SHOULD have been feminine-code had failed to receive its proper categorization in the marketplace of ideas because feminism was poisoning the culture, and men who should have known better were eating it unawares, and thus unknowingly making pansies of themselves. You, as someone who wished to be perceived as properly embodying the essential traits of your masculinity, were to stop eating it. And laugh at those who continued to do so.

But it was a bullshit narrative then, and it's a bullshit narrative now. Quiche wasn't feminine-coded prior to that in anyone's thinking, because it's fucking food, and food needn't be gender coded at all. The only ones who want to make it so are selling something...either a marked up version of a product that used to be for everyone, but can be sold for more if you make a version that's "for" men, or "for" women (e.g. laundry detergent), or else the notion of Proper Gendered Behavior itself. That second option is by far the more profitable if you play your cards right.
posted by Ipsifendus at 7:59 AM on November 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


“Tactical” baby carriers

Killing people as part of an army is still a bedrock source of power in our world, and it's still a job mostly limited to men. I have a suspicion that gender essentialism won't be seriously threatened until that changes: Either equality of women in combat, or the waning of the importance of armies.

I think you can see the ebb and flow of it: After the Vietnam war, when American armies were demoralized and despised, gender-neutral toys and clothes were at their peak in the US. After 9/11, when war became fashionable again, gender essentialism came roaring back. And so you get tactical baby carriers. (In case you need, as a modern well-balanced man, to carry your baby into a firefight in Kurdistan.)

[/half-baked theory]
posted by clawsoon at 8:08 AM on November 4, 2017 [15 favorites]


When I noticed how the male toiletry section at the local supermarket was expanding with butch colors and musky scents, I started to joke of starting a new product called Manpons. The Tampon for Men. Camo or gun metal blue colored, available in WD40 or Hoppe's No. 9 scent. What does a man do with a manpon? Sticks it up his ass. When he's had enough, he pulls it out and flushes it down the toilet, because nothing is more manly than pulling out the toilet augur when it won't flush anymore.

I knew men were fragile enough. White hetero men even moreso. I wonder how long it will be when the Manpon isn't a joke anymore?
posted by 2N2222 at 8:09 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


I feel bad for men mostly.

The day John Mayer identified a sufficiently dudely heart emoji, I felt it for like a second.
posted by palindromic at 8:14 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


The laundry thing kills me. KILLS ME. As noted upthread, Arm & Hammer isn't exactly feminine. Nor is Tide (orange and blue!) or Gain (green!) or All or Cheer (blue!). Seriously NOTHING about the majority of laundry detergent brands is coded feminine (i.e. pink, pastel, or floral, I guess), other than in their unimaginative brains that seem to think if they saw their mom or wife holding something once it automatically has the taint of womanhood. And the "formula that hasn't been updated in decades" line just shows a vast (feigned?) ignorance of the market when the number of new/improved/specialized Tide formulations is so large that the brand takes up all 5 shelves over half an entire aisle in Target.

My boyfriend uses some Old Spice body wash that has such stupid man-centric copy on the back of the bottle that I had to turn it around so I didn't have to look at it every time I showered. Of course the front also says "man-sized" even though the large pump bottle is exactly the same size as my large pump bottle of Oil of Olay body wash.

Yesterday as I was leaving the office I happened upon two coworkers (women) telling stories about how their dads have both complained about the color/style of dog collars they had purchased for their male dogs, because the collars were too girly for a male dog. Like, what? They are DOGS. I responded with "Men are so fragile" and we all had a good laugh but at the same time it's so stupid and depressing.
posted by misskaz at 8:16 AM on November 4, 2017 [39 favorites]


Hafer says he doesn’t have an issue with men who exude traditionally “feminine” traits, but that’s just not what he’s personally into

this sounds like 75% of gay personal ads
posted by AFABulous at 8:21 AM on November 4, 2017 [44 favorites]


I generally perceive pinkwashed products as being pretty chintzy. I wouldn't have a problem using a pink hammer just because it was pink, but experience tells me that the head is going to fly off probably, so I do not buy those things. And I reflexively think the same way about those manwashed products as well. If your marketing is going too hard on the lifestyle/identity veneer on a basic assed product like laundry detergent or coffee or something, your product is probably overpriced crap and your customers suckers.

I get it if it's cosmetics or cologne or clothing or something, because those are major parts of people's identity kits and it'd be tough to extricate those associations. But basic sustenance food and cleaning supplies and stuff? Yes, commercials and print ads do tend to play on gendered stereotypes, but the products themselves are not usually gendered. The gendering of the products themselves is mostly retroactive, but it apparently works because we're cultured to associate our personal identity with consumption.

Masculinity does have its own unique kind of fragility, but capitalists are really good at manufacturing and exploiting insecurities of all kinds.

But also.

The laundry industry is slow to reach out to men (though this is just as much a frustration of women as it is men).

Yes, OK. It is just as much a frustration.

Seriously?
posted by ernielundquist at 8:24 AM on November 4, 2017 [13 favorites]


Maybe market them as “Camolines?”

You're hired.
posted by thivaia at 8:25 AM on November 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


Just remember the trans masc people reading this thread when you type your words about the ways masculinity is being made a terrible construct by those who perform it.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:26 AM on November 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


I wonder how long it will be when the Manpon isn't a joke anymore?

I wonder how many minds would be blown if a major manufacturer started marketing a masculine tampon for trans men? Imagine the thinkpieces! (Or, actually, don't.)
posted by skymt at 8:30 AM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


This is the first I've heard of smoothie bowls. Am I missing something good?
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 8:31 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh, and regarding the MartinWisse post upthread, I saw this on boingboing recently. Just, ew.

R. Crumb had some good advice back in the day with this PSA.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:32 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Hell, I look like the love child of a lumberjack and an overall-wearing plumber most of the time, I drive a huge old pickup truck, work in the building trades, and it doesn't bother me in the least that I get funny looks on the worksite over my Petticoat Junction lunchbox or that mean bartenders roll their eyes when I order my usual Shirley Temple with an extra cherry.

No offense but this is coming from a place of privilege. I know you're gay (if I remember right) but I see a fair number of straight cis men I know saying they paint their nails or whatever and acting like they're progressive when they're at the least possible risk for getting their heads caved in. It's not you we need to fight for. We need to protect the feminine men who wear nail polish and eyeliner.

As a fairly masculine trans guy I do use some of these products because they help me express my masculinity to myself. No one knows what kind of body wash I use, so it's for me, not you. Part of the point of transitioning was that I wouldn't feel boxed into using feminine things, because that felt wrong to me. I lived the first 40 years of my life pretending and being self-conscious about appearing too masculine, and I'm done with that.

That said, literally all of my trans male friends are more feminine than I am, from just appearing medium-metrosexual to full-on makeup and fishnet stockings. I am by far the most boring, standard issue white American male. But I think it's awesome that we can express ourselves on such a spectrum.
posted by AFABulous at 8:35 AM on November 4, 2017 [18 favorites]


PS This is the laundry detergent I use. It is suitable for a number of manly tasks such as cleaning up oil spills (MOTOR AND GUN OIL mostly). And when I am done with the detergent, I get a burly new bucket for all the different bucket stuff I have to do.

It doesn't have a Tread Brite pattern on the label, though, so it is still OK for me to use.
posted by ernielundquist at 8:36 AM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


“If I were in Portland or Seattle or anywhere else, I’d feel completely out of place. I can’t go to these coffee shops and talk about libertarian issues or pro-gun issues,”

So, he's apparently never been Portland east of 39th or west of Cedar Hills
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:36 AM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


I can't get past the stupidity of naming it "manpoo." Finally men have been liberated from the tyranny and can rub their own shit in their hair! $7.59 for eight oz. Adding "man" to stuff to make it clownishly hypermasculine has been a joke for too long; you can't just do it seriously and expect people to buy your manproducts. And if they wanted to rehabilitate "shampoo" by making it more manly, why did they retain the cutest part of the word? "Poo!" Often used with an apostrophe as a cute nickname for champagne, notoriously french and therefore feminine. With the two Os, like bubbles! Pure idiocy. It should have been called "hairwash for men."
posted by Don Pepino at 8:41 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Of course the front also says "man-sized"

This is such a pet peeve of mine. "Man sized" is always a lie. The product is never the size of a man, even a small one!
posted by Dysk at 8:42 AM on November 4, 2017 [35 favorites]


Just remember the trans masc people reading this thread when you type your words about the ways masculinity is being made a terrible construct by those who perform it.
I don't think that the issue is that masculinity is being made a terrible construct by those who perform it. I think the issue is that gender is a system, and the system functions as a hierarchy. And all of us, no matter where we're located in that system, are dealing with the fact that it's hierarchical, and that shapes our behavior, albeit in different and complicated ways. And if you're talking about gender in a way that misses or erases that hierarchy, then you're probably missing some important things.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:43 AM on November 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


... their dads have both complained about the color/style of dog collars they had purchased for their male dogs, because the collars were too girly for a male dog.

There’s a YouTube channel called Vet Ranch, all about abandoned pets who get fixed up from terrible ailments and go on to get ready for happy lives. I really do recommend it. The vets who run it have a nonprofit to raise money to help these homeless animals, and they give their time at all hours. But I’ve noticed one thing: it genuinely bothers the head vet to put pink cloth on a male dog. Once he asked someone at the clinic to double check that there wasn’t any other adhesive wrap available, because he was about to have to wrap a male dog’s broken leg in bright pink. He has got deep goodness in him, obviously, and I’m not about to complain, but dude. Dude.

Does Hafer not know that there is a coffee shop for guys? It’s called Dunkin Donuts. Maybe where he lives it’s called Krispy Kreme, or McDonalds, but the point is, every town has a place where you can get a cup of hot black coffee that you are not actually supposed to like. And it often has old guys who sit there for hours and complain about how the world isn’t what they want it to be anymore.

I am less annoyed about man-branded hair products, if only because I really want young men to learn about conditioning and layered cuts without panicking.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:45 AM on November 4, 2017 [13 favorites]


And if you're talking about gender in a way that misses or erases that hierarchy..

You assume I’m missing it?
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:45 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


I keep telling people that dogs have no concept of gender but that makes humans really uncomfortable.

Seriously NOTHING about the majority of laundry detergent brands is coded feminine (i.e. pink, pastel, or floral, I guess), other than in their unimaginative brains that seem to think if they saw their mom or wife holding something once it automatically has the taint of womanhood.

Yes, I mean I am just a stupid women and therefore empty-headed but I read many of the household products my husband and I buy as neutral. We buy "green" type laundry and dishwasher detergent that don't have scents and usually come in white packaging. We both use the same chapstick (the horror) from Burt's Bees that comes in yellow packaging, without, like, vaginas on it or anything. I can see that our shampoo might be a little feminine because it supposedly smells like pears, but the bottle are very plain and dark green.

The idea that most laundry detergents are "not for men" simply because women mostly do the fucking laundry, and not because they're called "Pinky Princess Sparkle Laundry Magic" and come in a box shaped like a pink puppy, really pisses me off.
posted by Squeak Attack at 8:49 AM on November 4, 2017 [19 favorites]


You assume I’m missing it?
You in the general sense, not you specifically. Some of the comments here do seem to be missing it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:51 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


Squeak Attack: it occurs to me that female dogs are extremely comfortable with violently alerting everyone to the presence of men they don’t trust, showering affection on men and women that they do trust, and farting openly, all of which are traits strongly disapproved of in women. No wonder “bitch” is an insult.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:55 AM on November 4, 2017 [16 favorites]


You know what I do to fulfill a need for "masculine" grooming? Trim hairs in my ears and nostrils. The ones in the ears are turning white now. It will happen to you.
posted by thelonius at 8:56 AM on November 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


Yebbut Dunkin' coffee is terrible. And regular grocerystore health and beauty aids are so boring. Spending enormous piles of cash at "Lush" on colorful, imaginatively marketed, good smelling stuff that you're told is "artisan" and "magic" is fun, and the masculine among us may feel shut out of that experience. After I wrote that treatise on 'poo, I went and checked and of course "manpoo" is a joke (I'm really hoping it's not cognitive decline that it took that long for the penny to drop; it could be that I'm not through my first cup of coffee) and I went to the site of the shampoo referenced and the scales fell: it's a "Lush" for men. "Lush" is deliberately nongendered, obviously, so as to sell more soap to marks of every description, but some people do want their stuff gendered.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:57 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Seriously, ear hair is the worst.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:57 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's proof that God exists, and is laughing at us.
posted by thelonius at 8:58 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


My boyfriend uses some Old Spice body wash that has such stupid man-centric copy on the back of the bottle that I had to turn it around so I didn't have to look at it every time I showered. Of course the front also says "man-sized" even though the large pump bottle is exactly the same size as my large pump bottle of Oil of Olay body wash.

Old Spice has been making a joke out of fragile masculinity for more than a decade. It's kind of their schtick. That said, I do really enjoy the Denali Body wash. I think it smells nice, and I don't think it's particularly manly. Also, as I am allergic to pretty much everything in everything, it doesn't give me hives like some of my wife's body washes do - which is actually the most important bit.

But, I'm a dude with a great beard, who likes sharpening his axes and offroading his lifted 4WD truck and pants with lots and lots of pockets. I also like bubble baths with scented candles and will cheerfully do the laundry, but my wife hates the way I do it so I am forbidden (You can't wash socks with blue jeans, they'll get ruined, I guess).

The whole masculinity thing has always amused me. Especially coming as it does from so many Heinlein loving Libertarians. Heinlein is vigorously on record as saying a person should be able to weld as well as sew, to change diapers as capably as changing oil, to prepare a meal as capably as preparing an invasion. Like Christians who have never actually read the bible, I suspect these guys have never actually read Heinlein.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:10 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


but quality hair products isn’t something men have been told to want.

this is in a nutshell the reason why feminists always have been, always will be, and always should be trying to stab masculinity to death with tiny gold-plated oyster forks. as much fun as it is on a valueless aesthetic level, and it is, the essence of masculinity is only wanting what you're told to want.

and telling men to want better things is not only not solving that problem, it's not trying to. telling men not to care because masculinity means not caring is even worse.
posted by queenofbithynia at 9:15 AM on November 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


You in the general sense, not you specifically. Some of the comments here do seem to be missing it.

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

I’ve been dealing with systemic bullshit and trauma for so long now that I’m too weary and resigned these days to fight the systems of gender. To that I’ve given up trying to enumerate the front lines and antagonisms of the patriarchy. I super duper appreciate the people who are doing the work while I’m recuperating and restoring my mental health and gearing up to wade back into that fray again.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:18 AM on November 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


In a world where things designed for men are the default, anything actually gender-neutral, or even slightly feminine, starts to look uber-feminized. In a world where women have spent their whole lives making do with products that weren’t for them, men are suddenly surprised when the marketplace doesn’t cater to their specific needs.

Can't say it better than the article .
posted by AlexiaSky at 9:38 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


In the modern American sense, manliness is defined by fear and shame, add in a sense of something lost that they feel entitled to and you have fertile grounds for fascist and authoritarian thinking.
posted by The Whelk at 9:43 AM on November 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


“I wanted to market [Black Rifle Coffee] to what I felt was my subculture—dudes like me,” Hafer said.

Subculture? SUBCULTURE?!? Straight, white, cis men who like guns are a freaking SUBCULTURE?!? Yeah, it's just my silly, hormone-addled girlbrain IMAGINING that our government and entertainment industry are nearly fully staffed with them, and that their work caters to them.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:57 AM on November 4, 2017 [24 favorites]


> I remember when the original "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" first came out. In hindsight, it seems to have been an early prototype for the type of conspiracy-laden rhetoric surrounding gender roles that we now hear issuing from right-wing commentators with depressing regularity.

The thing is, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was a satire. And now you've got this entire generation of Real Manly Men (tm) emulating that sort of thing, that overexaggerated action movie parody of masculinity as the real deal, inasmuch as there is one. C'mon, dudes, you are literally a joke. If you really care about masculinity so much, could you please, please stop?
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:03 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


"my wife hates the way I do it"

IMPORTANT LAUNDRY FACT:
The dye in dark clothes like, notoriously, jeans will wash out of those clothes and into any white clothes, like socks, that you wash with the dark clothes.
You could:
1. go read the entire emotional labor thread and remake your whole existence
2. purge all the wardrobes of all the people in your household and mandate that everyone wear only white jeans or only black socks from now on
3. marry someone equally unconcerned with trying to keep white clothes from turning gray
4. continue to pretend not to know what you now know having read the IMPORTANT LAUNDRY FACT and whistle a carefree tune while you walk past your wife doing all the laundry on your way out to your truck to go fill every pocket in your cargo pants with bathbombs
or
5. get some marked up manturgent and turn every piece of cloth in the washing machine black.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:04 AM on November 4, 2017 [26 favorites]


Old Spice has been making a joke out of fragile masculinity for more than a decade. It's kind of their schtick.

Joke or not, the copy is fucking awful (and not funny) so I reserve my right to turn the bottle around. The type of joke where you do the thing you're making fun of is wearying to some. Like, it adds another layer of having to determine if it's real mansplaining or joke mansplaining, for example.
posted by misskaz at 10:07 AM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Real Men Can't Tell When It's Satire. I've been noticing this for years, when liberals satirize conservative ideals by exaggerating
them, conservatives respond not with shame but with enthusiasm. We gotta stop doing that.

My son loves quiche Lorraine because it's basically Breakfast Pie.
posted by emjaybee at 10:58 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


The thing is, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was a satire. And now you've got this entire generation of Real Manly Men (tm) emulating that sort of thing, that overexaggerated action movie parody of masculinity as the real deal, inasmuch as there is one. C'mon, dudes, you are literally a joke.

Yeah, this, too. The pop culture keeps defining masculinity more and more fragilely. There’s nothing uniquely fragile about human males. Identity construct theory provides a very robust theoretical basis for understanding how identity fragility can and does become a thing for any human beings; Maoist depersonalization techniques work just as well on self-identifying men, women, or any other self or socially assigned identity group. Everybody becomes more fragile when they feel the core of who they understand themselves to be to be under attack and we don’t socialize men with very solid positive ideals of masculinity so they’re less secure in that identity for all kinds of sociocultural reasons and accidental reasons, too. But in the end, nobody feels good being told there’s some aspect of who they are that they didn’t choose for themselves and can’t change that makes them inferior to others; when men feel that’s what others are saying, accurately or not, they’re bound to bristle and get as indignant about it as much as anyone would and othering them by implying that’s a uniquely gendered reaction is a mistake in my opinion, but yeah, I think in practice men tend to be more fragile than ever these days for a whole host of reasons more complex and sociological and cultural than anything gender essential.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:04 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


The dye in dark clothes like, notoriously, jeans will wash out of those clothes and into any white clothes, like socks, that you wash with the dark clothes.

And then what happens ? The world falls into the sun ? Does anyone actually care if my tube socks are truly white as opposed to sort of white ? Do I care about them caring ? Who has that kind of time ?

I mean - I was a single parent for years and years before I met her. I did laundry the way I did laundry - everything at once! cheap! fast! - (Yes, important stuff got handled separately, I'm not a monster) and I was happy with the results. She has other priorities. Which is fine - but if I'm doing the laundry, I am not spending all day doing laundry. She can if she wants. That's on her - she could do it my way and be done in half the time.

I mean, you're hurtling towards the grave. Why waste time folding underwear and tshirts ?

She also hates the way I load the dishwasher, but has learned to let go of that because she doesn't want to do it. But really, it just doesn't matter very much how its done. You'll doing the dishes again tomorrow or the next day, so they don't have to be done perfectly every single time. But she spends all this time neatly arranging the dishes in the dishwasher, and I just stuff them in there. It really bugs her that the dishes come out clean anyway - like I'm cheating or something.

But she got her own toolbox and tools because, ERMAGERD, you can't just have your sockets and wrenches in a pile like that. Are we cave people ? Are there no standards ?
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 11:27 AM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


Like Christians who have never actually read the bible, I suspect these guys have never actually read Heinlein.

That might be their one and only smart move.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:56 AM on November 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


And then what happens? The world falls into the sun?
No, your tube socks become sort of white rather than truly white.
Does anyone actually care if my tube socks are truly white as opposed to sort of white?
Your wife cares.
Do I care about them caring?
Probably. You probably actually feel a little bit bad about your wife doing all the laundry because she wants you to have beautiful tube socks.
Who has that kind of time?
Very likely you do, but you're spending it arguing on Metafilter instead of sorting the laundry, which does not actually take as much time as typing this comment took me and isn't really that much less enjoyable.

Maybe you can take on the IMPORTANT LAUNDRY FACT and she can take on the following IMPORTANT DISHWASHER FACT and you guys can agree to disagree about how to maintain toolboxes. Here is the fact: while it is true that you can fit vastly more into a dishwasher if you load it with painstaking jigsawpuzzle care, dishwasher manuals say that because they barely use any water these days, you'll actually save money if you just throw the dishes in as you generate them and push start and run more, lighter loads rather than rinsing everything so you can wait 'til you can amass a perfect, giant, packed-in load.
posted by Don Pepino at 12:30 PM on November 4, 2017 [14 favorites]


Real men have sort-of-white socks.
posted by clawsoon at 12:46 PM on November 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


this is waaaaaay far up-thread now but can i just say

The Island of Trans Lesbian Furries

...i want to go to there, it sounds like a delightful home
posted by halation at 12:49 PM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


...particularly since I live on the island of 'you take your coffee black, that's so phallic' (literal thing a co-worker said to me once; said co-worker also complimented a cis dude for being 'secure enough' to order a green tea latte. we stopped asking that co-worker to go on office coffee runs after that.)
posted by halation at 12:51 PM on November 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


I spent a couple of years living on the island of misfit trans but now I’m more like Buddy from the movie Elf and I’m lost in New Cis City, generally making an ass of myself with my complete buffoonery at “doing gender like the regulars” but I at least have a Zooey Deschanel character as my companion now so it’s perfectly delightfully and awfully twee as fuck. And totally problematic as hell nonstop but I just let most of that “doing gender terribly” shit slide because life is way complicated and really it’s not my battle right now.
posted by Annika Cicada at 1:12 PM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


It’s become gendered somehow to like food that’s hard to like. Black coffee, blue steak, rough whiskey - all very manly, all good for Cool Girl points if women take them. For that sensibility, you couldn’t design a more offensive drink than a flavored latte: sweetened, spiced, and enriched with cream - meant to be enjoyed by everyone.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:12 PM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


And then what happens ? The world falls into the sun ? Does anyone actually care if my tube socks are truly white as opposed to sort of white ? Do I care about them caring ? Who has that kind of time ?

Maybe your clothes aren't the only ones getting discolored? If everything gets washed together, maybe her white shirts are also getting messed up?

My husband does most of the laundry because he has special bike clothes that need more coddling than biological cell lines, and he used to default to the "everything else gets all washed together" idea. Until he washed a new bright red rayon blouse of mine, and it not only shrank into unwearability but also left giant magenta splotches all over his work khakis. Now he's a little more discriminating.
posted by KathrynT at 1:27 PM on November 4, 2017 [12 favorites]


Companies sell "manpoo"?

And here I've been donating it to sewer system for free all my life! What a sucker I've been!

Gonna get some mason jars and a few boxes of All-Bran, start me up a business!

sorry sorry sorry but c'mon "manpoo" is like a hanging curveball of a word -- not swinging at it would be a goddamned sin and my inner nine year old would never forgive me
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 2:16 PM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


It’s become gendered somehow to like food that’s hard to like.

I hate coffee, beer, dark chocolate, hard liquor and nicotine. But I love Indian lemon pickle, so come at me dudebros. My pallet is hella refined, I just don't want my food to be actually unpleasant.

It's been my observation for years, though, that marketing targeted at men seems to be trying to sell products via triple dog dares. Car commercials targeting dudes are like "CAN YOU HANDLE THIS CAR THAT WILL PROBABLY LEAD TO YOUR SWIFT DEATH???" "CAN YOU CONSUME THIS DORITO THAT WILL MELT YOUR STOMACH LINING UPON CONTACT???" "CAN YOU EAT THIS MEAL THAT WILL REQUIRE YOU TO HAVE A TRIPLE BYPASS THE NEXT DAY???"

Gotta confess, guys, I don't get it. I mean, I feel insecurity and stuff, but I'd like to survive my purchases if possible.
posted by soren_lorensen at 2:21 PM on November 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


I am by far the most boring, standard issue white American male. But I think it's awesome that we can express ourselves on such a spectrum.

My partner used to do panels on trans stuff for college classes. One time, he came home and told me that after that day's panel, a student had come up to him and said that he'd found my partner really inspiring, that all the trans people he knew who were his age were into gender fluidity and non-binary stuff and being really visible and out, but my partner showed him that it was possible for a trans man to be just a really regular, ordinary guy. Like, "just because you're trans doesn't mean you can't be boring!" Thus we inspire the next generation.
posted by Orlop at 2:24 PM on November 4, 2017 [27 favorites]


Frey hopes that by getting men excited about detergent, they will be amped to do laundry too

I hope everyone understands that NO ONE is AMPED to do laundry EVER. It's something everyone has to do. And the more delicate the fabric of your clothes then the more care it requires. This isn't that complicated. Laundry isn't like, a hobby that's been pitched at women traditionally like knitting or scrap booking. It's a chore that has to get done. And it has to get done the right way if we want the increasingly flimsy shit we're given to last more than 2 washes. For goodness sake. I can't believe this needs to be said.
posted by bleep at 2:32 PM on November 4, 2017 [25 favorites]


soren_lorensen: Car commercials targeting dudes are like "CAN YOU HANDLE THIS CAR THAT WILL PROBABLY LEAD TO YOUR SWIFT DEATH???" "CAN YOU CONSUME THIS DORITO THAT WILL MELT YOUR STOMACH LINING UPON CONTACT???" "CAN YOU EAT THIS MEAL THAT WILL REQUIRE YOU TO HAVE A TRIPLE BYPASS THE NEXT DAY???" Gotta confess, guys, I don't get it. I mean, I feel insecurity and stuff, but I'd like to survive my purchases if possible.

I have a similar reaction to painful women's fashion. Why wear something that hurts you? It's interesting that there's an intersection between self-inflicted pain and exaggerated gender performance. You endure Jackass-style stunts to prove that you're definitely a manly man. You wear permanent-injury high heels to prove that you're definitely a girly girl. What's going on with that, with pain and proving your gender credentials?

(Of course, many women are forced to wear painful clothing as part of regressive dress codes, which is a different-but-related thing.)
posted by clawsoon at 2:43 PM on November 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


I suck at femininity so I'm not down with painful fashion either, but you'll note that most women's fashion isn't marketed as intentionally painful. Like, Jimmy Choo is not using ad copy like "THESE SHOES WILL FUCK YOUR FEET UP AND GIVE YOU BUNIONS!" The implication is that in order to be sexy sometimes you have to endure pain but the pain is not the end goal. And most women's clothes anymore is positioned more like "This is not nearly as uncomfortable as it could be, and you'll still be attractive!"
posted by soren_lorensen at 2:54 PM on November 4, 2017 [14 favorites]


What's going on with that, with pain and proving your gender credentials?

Unfakeable signalling and the sunk-cost fallacy, to start with.
posted by clew at 2:55 PM on November 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


It’s become gendered somehow to like food that’s hard to like. Black coffee, blue steak, rough whiskey - all very manly, all good for Cool Girl points if women take them.

There's nothing wrong with any of those things in themselves, or with liking them. They're just acquired tastes.

It's the pointless gendering of them that's ridiculous and damaging.

Yes, some people pretend to like things they don't for social points, and there are those obscene eating contest shows where people eat until they're too sick to keep going, but most people who like things like that really do like them and aren't doing it just to impress someone.

For that sensibility, you couldn’t design a more offensive drink than a flavored latte: sweetened, spiced, and enriched with cream - meant to be enjoyed by everyone.

This is the part that offended me because those things are always way too sweet for me, and it's not internalized misogyny because I've disliked sweet foods since I was a baby. And, like most adults, I'm a bit lactose intolerant.

I don't dislike those things because they're coded feminine and I'm trying to get Cool Girl points. I dislike them because I don't like them and they make me sick.

There's nothing more inherently sincere or universal about things that are coded feminine. It's the gender coding that's the problem, and perpetuating that by assigning gendered motivations to people's preferences perpetuates it.

Criticize the marketing, criticize gender policing and gatekeeping, but let people like the things they like.
posted by ernielundquist at 3:18 PM on November 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


This was totally a million comments ago, but:

At its most extreme, it leads to not wanting to wipe down there because touching your butthole is a little bit too gay for some.

I probably don't want to know the answer to this, but is this actually a thing, or just a funny thought?


Sadly, it is.
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:58 PM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


I want only soren_lorenson writing ad slogans in this universe from now on.

I really enjoyed the “man your man could smell like” era of Old Spice marketing, when they took all the manly-man stuff up to eleven. As others have mentioned, the satire seems to have escaped its own targets, and I’m sure the deodorant industry finds those people’s money as good as anyone’s.

Similarly, the promising thing about the 21st-Century’s embrace of Geek Culture was supposed to be that anyone could like whatever they liked, unironically...so I find it bizarre when male geeks still get territorial about who should participate in their fandoms. Like, y’all colonized My Little Pony in the name of your own balls, you can’t handle women liking the same live-action TV?

All this “FINALLY A TOOTHPICK MEN CAN USE!” copy is absolutely about selling insecure people the idea that their masculinity is “enough,” even if they doubt their own sex appeal or inwardly question their orientation/identity. It’s just selling that idea to a more diverse range of people than before. For instance, the coronation of a trans playmate was NOT about inclusiveness or equality; it was really just about reassuring certain insecure cis men that they were still “respectably” straight and macho if they were attracted to one. Just constrain everything ELSE you like... Likewise, everything from Dr Pepper 10 to those manly anal wipes is for those men, and also for “no femmes” gay men, and for trans men who are wracked with anxiety about just passing and getting through the day, and for your uncle Cody who thinks Tim Allen is some kind of martyr.

I’ve no doubt that this kind of commercial masculinity is an exhausting and oppressive and impossible ideal for all those gents. Just for my own sake, I’m glad I married one who willingly cooks meals indoors, and likes cats, and doesn’t boycott a brand of Scotch if he sees a woman drinking it on TV.
posted by armeowda at 4:13 PM on November 4, 2017


Is it wrong of me to want to market to these men now? Like, Pedialyte, but it’s for MEN after a long night of getting FUCKED. UP. at the bar with the boys. Nurse that hangover with GLACIAL ICE and BLOOD OF YOUR ENEMIES flavors!
posted by gucci mane at 5:16 PM on November 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


For instance, the coronation of a trans playmate was NOT about inclusiveness or equality; it was really just about reassuring certain insecure cis men that they were still “respectably” straight and macho if they were attracted to one

True but if this gets through, and this is normalized, it is going to save a lot of lives. Many (most?) trans women who are murdered are killed because a guy slept with them (or wanted to sleep with them) and freaked out. This is still a valid legal defense in most states.
posted by AFABulous at 5:18 PM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


Uhhhh hey I’m cool with a hot as fuck binary trans woman playmate. I’m a trans woman. I support this. I’m certain many trans women don’t. Trans women don’t agree on stuff. I’m not speaking for all trans women. But yeah, men need to be cool and DTF trans women. If that requires playboy sexualizing us then I’m good. Make us sex objects. Whatever it takes to stop trans women of color from getting murdered at appalling levels across the globe.
posted by Annika Cicada at 5:53 PM on November 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


I keep telling people that dogs have no concept of gender but that makes humans really uncomfortable.

The very definition of fragile masculinity: Neuticles

"...helping neuter hesitant pet owners overcome the trauma of altering and allowing their beloved pet to retain its natural look and self esteem."
posted by Preserver at 6:10 PM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Nobody in my family drinks coffee with any kind of crap in it whatsoever. I was the single holdout traitor to the gene pool. I took to coffee relatively late because I used to drink, shudder, Coke, and when I started I used to drink what the coffee shops in my then area called breves with an accent whatever over the second e. It was a cappuccino, except made with half and half instead of milk. It cost a planet and you couldn't drink it all day without getting full on it. I finally went black and never went back in grad school because I realized you got to drink more coffee that way, and then I got a taste for it and now can't stand anything in it. Somewhere in the new millennium I realized that it was no longer necessary to dump whatever of yesterday's coffee I didn't finish down the sink because there was nothing to curdle, so you could reheat it the next day. Now I spend much less on coffee and can drink it by the vat and best of all I don't have to struggle to remember to buy cream all the time. But anyway, the women of the family are the ones that are hardcore fiends for their black coffee and I never knew until this thread that anybody considered black coffee male. I don't think that's accurate at all or if it is it's a millennial thing. At Mister Donut we made a white slurry out of a big scoop of offbrand coffeemate and tapwater stirred around in a plastic KoolAid pitcher. We poured it into the little steel creamers on the counter and kept dragging them out for two or three days, refrigerating them each night when we closed. Every single craggy counter regular took that crap in his coffee, and sugar. Sometimes they'd complain that it was curdled. You couldn't tell by the taste--it always tasted like the middle of a Milk Dud. But it would turn all chunky in the cup. Manly coffee.
posted by Don Pepino at 6:28 PM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


When Inuit hunters drop a caribou and field dress the carcass (after a prayer of thanks), after pulling out the intestines for the tundra birds to eat, the shooter who made the kill cuts out a steaming bloody kidney and takes a bite of it, raw, then it is passed around to the other hunters in the group who each take a bite, before getting down to the work of field-dressing before the swarms of mosquitoes make you mad or the cold becomes unbearable or you spot another herd.

And yeah, I've had a bite or two myself. It's a ritual rather than a gustatory delight. For that you might enjoy fermented walrus flipper -- as long as it was done right and there's no botulinum toxin. Or fermented whale blood with chunks of raw whale blubber, which tastes surprisngly like chocolate.

I also like quiche. Just saying.
posted by spitbull at 7:47 PM on November 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Mod note: armeowda, I don't think you're in a good position to contradict or lecture trans women on their lived experience, and it doesn't make for a good thread.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:38 PM on November 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


I hope everyone understands that NO ONE is AMPED to do laundry EVER. It's something everyone has to do. And the more delicate the fabric of your clothes then the more care it requires. This isn't that complicated. Laundry isn't like, a hobby that's been pitched at women traditionally like knitting or scrap booking. It's a chore that has to get done. And it has to get done the right way if we want the increasingly flimsy shit we're given to last more than 2 washes. For goodness sake. I can't believe this needs to be said.

I'm here to tell you that this is incorrect. I fucking love laundry day and a laundry basket gives me the same giddy feeling of something amazing about to happen that the old CBS Special Presentation bumper used to give my youthful self. I'm literally skipping around the yard as happy as a damn lark when I'm hanging my clothes on the line out back, and the cloak of line-dried scent that falls over my shoulders like a pageant sash when I'm meticulously folding my laundry into perfect little units of ready-to-wear gives me a feeling like what sweaty Pentecostals feel when they're speaking tongues in a revival tent. I feel the same way about a sink full of dishes, a filthy car next to a bucket of soapy water, and scruffy-looking shoes that need a shine, but I'm a clockwork taoist with a visceral adoration of the processes required to be a person in the world.

In past years, when I'd write about these loves of my life, I'd get an interesting perspective from women, particularly older women, who'd been inserted in these roles by the nonsense of biology as misinterpreted by patriarchal imperialists, and I get why people who got stuck doing mountains of laundry because the worthless men in their lives had decided that it was their job and solely their job because…reasons have a reluctance about such things. I've heard the same about cooking and cleaning and other forced labors, and I am entirely understanding of why there are generations of women who have a rightful aversion in these cases, as I have roughly the same experience when it comes to all sports except curling, religion, Scouting, and heavy metal.

I get it, and know that I come from a position of privilege, as rightly pointed out by AFABulous:

No offense but this is coming from a place of privilege. I know you're gay (if I remember right) but I see a fair number of straight cis men I know saying they paint their nails or whatever and acting like they're progressive when they're at the least possible risk for getting their heads caved in. It's not you we need to fight for. We need to protect the feminine men who wear nail polish and eyeliner.

I know that I am in an exceptionally lucky position to love chores that were bondage for women in the past, as evidenced by my grandmother's utter shock when I lugged home and lovingly restored a mid-forties Apex wringer washer that was, to her, a memory of basement drudgery for a family of five in blue collar Baltimore.

"Joe-B! You know I'd have loaned you a little money if you wanted a proper warshing machine!" she chided, and my contention that I specifically sought out a wringer washing machine because I wanted one was even more exotic to a woman born in 1910 than the fact that I had a boyfriend and only drove French cars.

And here's the thing—privilege comes with responsibility. While the ways in which I vary from my gender would have gotten me a swift trip to a psychiatrist and a heap of scorn in 1951, they're now something that I can embrace because of the privilege that I'm built like a bar bouncer from the bad side of town and no one's going to do more than roll their eyes at my ownership of four gorgeously maintained and frequently employed sewing machines.

I'm a gay guy who was given my position of privilege by the sissies and the bull daggers that went up against the barricades when the police were still beating people who loved like I do, back when the people who looked most like me were content to hide behind drawn curtains as "confirmed bachelors" instead of terrifying variations on bipolar gender themes that were not remotely flexible. It was never the tough guys at the front when the war came to us—it was the women in suits and bowlers and the swimmy drag queens and transgender pioneers who, when the cops came, insisting that the party was over and everyone had to come down to the station, turned back, with a curled lip, and said "The fuck we will."

It's fantastic that straight men are finally getting comfortable drifting off the old axes of what's acceptable, and it's wonderful that women are loosening up the bonds of their assigned roles, and it's so amazing to me to see an emerging world in which notions of masculinity, femininity, and gender-independence are being unlocked into a new world of modular gender performance and affinities and a DIY identity culture in which we finally get to define ourselves instead of arriving already destined for the same old things. There are a lot of issues of privilege, residual misunderstandings, and the thing I have to be vigilant about and avoid myself, the Great White Savior™ complex, but you have to chart a course through a world where all these things still exist, and it's pretty dicey.

You just have to be as you as possible, as openly as possible.

Sometimes, you need to be lucky, too. You need to be lucky enough to have a grandmother watch you treat domesticity like a sacrament when, to her, it left scars and sore places from the shackles, and to hear the stories she tells. You need to be lucky enough to have friends transitioning, particularly when you have friends that are patient enough to get past your bred-in prurience about their downstairs arrangements and give you a real perspective that you've never had, to the point that you need to be comfortable learning that you've been wrong.

Hell, sometimes it's just a matter of having a tiny new person in your life who, when you're sitting at the table next to her, sewing flawless costumes for her, her dog, and her stuffed rabbit, asking you "Joebie? How come you can sew?"

You have to pause, think of the sissies at the barricades, the grandmother working in wartime factories, the tough ladies flying military planes overseas when we were all supposed to be what the birth certificate destined us to be, the gay mathematician breaking codes, or just someone seemingly ordinary, like your mother, who when you got curious as she sat there, hemming hand-me-down trousers for you on her magical Singer Rocketeer, pulled up a chair and taught you a craft that was not popularly assigned to those of your gender. You have to stop and think of your late drag queen friend, too, who taught you how to properly use the buttonholer and how to use the rolling foot to tuck marabou neatly into desperately limp silver lamé.

"I can sew because my mommy was a woman who could do anything, and because my friend Allen was the most beautiful lady in the whole world."

"Can I do it?"

"Let me get a scrap piece and a box to put the pedal on, hon."

It's true, too, that that stupid book about "real" men, whatever the hell those are supposed to be, came out in an ugly, awful decade for people like me, when a whole generation of elders who could have been a source of wisdom for fluffy-coiffed newly minted gay boys like me, and that I've since watched masculinity gradually freeze into something so hard and unyielding that a soft-spoken Georgia country boy like my father would have never recognized, despite his own deep immersion into what it meant to be a man back in the day, but when I feel gloomy about how stratified we are, I have to remember that things get brittle just before they break, and that shit is breaking so fast that a whole generation of backwards-thinking rightists are panicking, feeding a movement that won't last, because it, too, is as delicate as pond ice in December.

We absolutely need to stand with our sissies, butches, freethinkers, not-yet-determined varieties, and with anyone who looks into gender as a modular, open field that contains multitudes, wonders, and responsibilities. The people that took the first steps out onto that plain of familiar rules and cracked the concrete—these are my heroes, and I give thanks to anyone who's fighting the good fight for their service, and for what I can access and enjoy thanks to their courage and commitment both before my time and right here and now.

"Joebie? I want Sally to be a superhero scientist," says Little Miss, as I'm halfway through the first costume for her dog.

"Okay," I say, thinking out how to make the change.

"Also, a fish."

"A superhero scientist fish, you say?"

"Uh-huh."

"Everything is permitted," I say to her, quoting Burroughs quoting Hassan I Sabbah, and dig through my fabric for something a bit scalier.
posted by sonascope at 7:00 AM on November 5, 2017 [27 favorites]


So, he's apparently never been Portland east of 39th or west of Cedar Hills


Or even just a Dutch Bros, or one of those places that cater to the tech crowd, and like tech boys everywhere they are all over libertarian free market bootstrapped self made no free lunch dungeons and dragons 8 bit video game guns.
posted by idiopath at 7:58 AM on November 5, 2017


When we were in Poland in the 90s staying with my friend's family we went out in search of a little gorgeous German washer for his mother that would spin clothes and free her from the unwieldy backbreaking wringer machine that had to be rolled out from under the sink every time. It took her a solid day every week and killed her back. The little gorgeous machines were all ruinously expensive, though, and we couldn't do it, to our grief and hers, though she kept insisting she didn't need one. I just partially made up for this failing last spring when I blew close to 1,000 bucks to get my friend a washing machine so that she could do laundry at home instead of trucking it to the laundromat. I only got free of the laundromat three years ago, myself, and right away I gave my next door neighbor a key to my house so she can use my machines when I'm not home. The laundromat slog traps the launderer in a hideous three-hour limbo of noise and dust. It is your precious free time, but not really: you must spend it in this place. Inescapable and horrible. It's not so easy to be zen with Fox News blaring over the noise of screaming kids and people fighting over driers. This isn't something that happened "in the past." Be you, by all means: it's great that you found a way to make it fun and an artisan pursuit. But I have to say I question the value to society of you being you quite so openly about this one thing. I know you probably meant it as a show of honoring her years of work. But there's a little bit of Nelson HaHa about putting that wringer machine all up in your grandmother's face. Too soon, I'm saying. It's insulting for somebody with the time and money and outdoor acreage to make laundry artisan to make a big frolicky show of it in the faces of people without those resources who are forced into drudgery. If you had to drain the machine into the toilet and hang up the wet clothes in the bathroom like my friend's mother rather than darting out to meet God among the clean sheets in the dewyfresh morning sun, you'd be a little humbler, likely, about the tao of laundry.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:11 AM on November 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


Well, in the case of my grandmother, we have approximately the same acreage, but she was stuck doing laundry for five and I did laundry for one for the longest time and now do it for three. I didn't actually "put my wringer washer up in [her] face"—I just mentioned it in passing at one point and she was aghast. At the time, I liked the fact that I was (A) saving a ton of water and soap, (B) doing laundry at home almost as fast as I can do it in a laundromat (one load washing, one load in the rinse water in the two-basin sink, one being wrung), and (C) saving energy and money with a machine that used half the electricity to do the same job and which, because it's a simple machine, lasts long and is easily repairable. Plus, the wringer washer got my clothes cleaner and damaged them less in the wash, so I saved money there, too.

What you call a "big frolicky show" is me just enjoying my life. I make choices, and I have cultivated the ability to take pleasure from tasks that most people hate, because I have limited financial resources and hating the things we have to do just makes us constantly angry and dissatisfied with our lives. I could have probably gotten a better office job, surrendered to the standard American cubicle-farming lifestyle to pay for the standard American "labor-saving" device economy, but that's just not an interest to me. Not sure why my choices are worthy of ridicule whereas being miserable about having to labor to accomplish tasks, but that's your trip. I get by on a poverty-level income some years and being content with the notion that some things require effort is fine with me. Your mileage, apparently, will vary.

The laundromat, for instance? I love laundromats, and I'm not bothered by "screaming children" and "Fox News" by virtue of a pair of earphones and a music player that cost fifty bucks eight years ago, and I set up my laundry, read a book, write, or make some music in the laundromat, and then listen to music or podcasts while I fold. My precious free time at the laundromat isn't spent in a sulk—while the machines are working, so am I. My point, of course, is to refute the claim that of course simply everyone hates doing laundry. I don't hate it, I am a party to everyone, as far as I know, and I'm not the only one. Plus, I'm a dude and I don't need enforced manliness to somehow make it okay to do the laundry, because there's nothing inherently unmasculine about laundry, in the same way that my grandmother working pumping gas at the family gas station wasn't inherently unfeminine.

My love of laundry isn't genetic. I didn't love it when I was a kid—though I did do it, because we were a family in which chores were part of our responsibilities. I didn't love it as a young adult, because I was young and socialized to be bored with everything and constantly frustrated by a system in which desperate, market-driven longing was epidemic. As I got older, though, I found it easier and easier to complete the tasks involved in my life as I cultivated the joy in them. Yeah, it's a zen process, and I'm well aware that white dudes observing Eastern spiritual practice has a long history of mockery, both deserved and undeserved, but nevertheless, I find contentment in effort and it's genuine and not something that was handed to me by right of genetics.

My grandmother was bemused by my wringer washer, we shared a matching scar from being snared in the wringer, and she taught me the best way to do dungarees without the rivets and the metal button for the fly getting damaged. She was content to use her modern washer-dryer, and was similarly amused by my atavism, even as she acknowledged, as someone who had herself lived so close to the bone, that she had to make choices based on finances and either find a way to be content with that or be constantly unhappy.

All winter, though, it's not all skipping through the daisies—I have racks and hang stuff in the house…which neatly solves the problem of low humidity at the same time.

YMMV.
posted by sonascope at 8:57 AM on November 5, 2017 [11 favorites]


Huh. Welp: I retract it all and apologize. Now that you've sketched out the benefits, I love the whole idea of your wringer. I wish I'd had the sense to look at that option when I was in my hut apartment because it sounds like it would've solved my problems. I know exactly where it would've lived: in the kitchen, against the east windows. It would've fit right in, too: the kitchen had not been touched since the 40s. And I could've strung line in there. Ah well...

Also, your grandmother was clearly lovely. I'm so glad to learn that she taught you about the rivets and buttons.

The closest I got to finding contentment in a life involving the laundromat was dumping the clothes in and fleeing home while they spun--but of course, I could only do that because I had a functioning car and a healthy ability to not look at how horribly wasteful it was to make twice the car trips just to avoid waiting for the washers to finish. Now that I have machines, it's my fave chore. I looove to fold. Eventually I'll get lines in the backyard and then the dream will be complete.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:27 AM on November 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


Previous comment came off unintentionally lecture-y and read as directed toward a particular demographic; apologies. Intended message: reassuring guys who ID as cis-het that it’s “acceptably manly” for them to objectify any marginalized gender is not a reliable safeguard against gender-based violence. Objectification and machismo are under scrutiny here, not attraction or identity.
posted by armeowda at 11:58 AM on November 5, 2017


I retract nothing.
posted by bleep at 1:59 PM on November 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


Grumpybearbride and I turned the laundromat horror into Romantic Laundry Night. One beer during the wash cycle, dinner during the dry cycle. Then CSI: Miami while we folded. It was magical.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:04 PM on November 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm a woman, and I love laundry like sonascope loves laundry. I know how to fold all my towels to the exact same size and shape, even though all the towels are different brands and slightly different sizes and shapes. I look for creative ways to fold clothes so they look better in a stack. When I was a little girl I had to argue my mother into letting me do my own laundry. I sew my own mesh laundry bags for delicates because the ones you buy in the store fall apart too easily and need too much mending. I enjoy learning so much that two of my favorite birthday presents for my sleeve board and my tailor’s ham. I had to use a laundromat for a while, and complete strangers would come up and comment on how cheerful I was and that it made them feel better. How could you not be cheerful they have that centrifuge thing you can put your clothes in and they dry in half the time! I wish I had one at home, but I'd have to get rid of the couch or something. My sister used to joke that I could have a side job just folding other people's fitted sheets.

But dishes? Feh.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:42 PM on November 5, 2017 [5 favorites]


So the dudebro from Black Rifle Coffee (mentioned in the Daily Dot article) did an AMA on Reddit. Even the reactionary pricks over there called him out on his bullshit.
posted by uncleozzy at 3:38 PM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


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