The Ick, season 4: disgust is IN PRINT, and it’s an absolute stunner.

I couldn’t have done it without you, dear subscriber. Thank you for being here, and for all the likes, comments, and shares along the way. Sending extra love to those who’ve been here since season one.

The Magazine

For season four, I gathered submissions from my talented writer friends—and after many months of editing and designing, the first-ever Ick Magazine is here!

The print edition includes your favorites…

• Eurydice’s exploration of the motherhood ick

• Jake Eaton on why we hate wet sounds

• deepfates’ tale of three plagues

• Lydia Laurenson on her experiences getting canceled

Plus,

• a print-only exclusive from sympathetic opposition!

It’s a super short run, so reserve your copy here →

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*If you’re a paid subscriber, please check your email for the address form to receive your free copy.*

The Launch Party

Now, let’s celebrate!

Save the date for The Ick Launch Party, happening January 16th in San Francisco. As a subscriber, you’re the first to know. Here are the details, I would LOVE to see you there.

When: Friday, January 16th, 2026
6:00pm-10:00pm

Where: The Intersection of Art and Technology (tiat) Gallery
151 Powell Street, San Francisco, CA

We’ll have drinks, snacks, magazines to purchase, photos, live readings from the contributors, and free rein of this incredible gallery space. (A partiful event will follow so you can invite your friends too.)

Thank you, sincerely, for supporting this project. A print magazine is a dream come true for me, and I’m so grateful.

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Over her career reporting on sex, spirituality, and social justice, Lydia has ventured back and forth across the political spectrum. In the 2000s, she built a following blogging about gender and feminism under the name Clarisse Thorn, then branched out to journalism in outlets like The Atlantic and Vice. In 2022, she was briefly engaged to Curtis Yarvin, a central figure in the right-wing neo-reactionary movement (her article Why I Was Part of the Dissident Right is a must-read). How does one person make such a swing from left to right?

In this article, Lydia reflects on how the search for ideological belonging got her cancelled on multiple fronts—and the implications this holds for anyone trying to find connection or redemption in a polarized world.

The first time I was “canceled” was in 2011.

I’d been writing about sex-positive feminism under the name Clarisse Thorn. The feminist movement was transforming: the forces we now call “social justice warriors” and “wokeness” were emerging, yet unnamed. “Cancel culture” was not so well-dissected as it is now, but it’s a long-running phenomenon. We referred to it as “call-out culture.” The blogger Ariel Meadow Stalling wrote a great post about it in 2012, titled “Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport.” (That title encapsulates so much about the phenomenon.) But the movement was not yet dominated by any of these things.

As Clarisse, I wrote primarily about BDSM and sexuality. In my personal life I was trained as a rape crisis counselor1 and I served in the Peace Corps, but I mostly didn’t write about those experiences, even though I was a feminist writer. As Clarisse, I wrote primarily about sex. I focused on consent theory, communication strategies, and my personal experience of fringe sexual practices. I tried to reconcile feminist theory with BDSM practice. At the time, this was difficult and controversial. I took occasional forays into so-called “men’s issues” and I wrote a book about pickup artists. I maintained my pseudonym because it was quite edgy to write directly about sex, especially my own sex life, so I was concerned about being publicly outed for my writing.2

My main goal was to share my honest explorations of the most complex and traumatic territory we navigate as humans, because I believe there are good things to be found there.

I started posting as Clarisse in 2008. That same year, a sex-positive feminist anthology came out, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape.3 I still think about its introduction 17 years later. The introduction started with Margaret Cho describing how she was raped in high school. Then she wrote these words, and I still tear up when I read them:

[My boyfriend after the rapist] made me feel so beautiful that I could start to see it, too. I learned to love sex and love myself and I grew up and became exactly what I wanted to become and I don’t go to high school reunions. Ever.

My past haunted me still, but it came to me in strange ways. I am surprised by how much sex I have had in my life that I didn’t want to have. Not exactly what’s considered “real” rape, or “date” rape, like my first time, although it is a kind of rape of the spirit—a dishonest portrayal or distortion of my own desire in order to appease another person—so it wasn’t rape at gunpoint, but rape as the alternative to having to explain my reasons for not wanting to have sex. You do it out of love sometimes, to save another’s feelings. And you do it out of hate sometimes, because you don’t want to hear your partner complain—like you hate their voice so much that whenever you aren’t made to hear it, it is a blessing. This is all sex I have said yes to, and sometimes even initiated—that I didn’t want to have. Often I would initiate the encounter just to get it over with, so it would be behind me, so it would be done. It is the worst feeling; it is like unpaid prostitution, emotional whoring. You don’t get paid in dollars, you get paid in averted arguments; you get paid by being able to avoid the truth another day. You hold your breath and you don’t feel your body, and you just let go of yourself. Your body responds just enough to make them think that you are into it, that you want it, that this is really sex. But it isn’t. I hate it, but I have done it, and I really don’t ever want to do it again because it is dehumanizing and demoralizing.

I said yes because I felt it was too much trouble to say no. I said yes because I didn’t want to have to defend my “no,” qualify it, justify it—deserve it. I said yes because I thought I was so ugly and fat that I should just take sex every time it was offered, because who knew when it would be offered again. I said yes because I believed what the kids at school told me—that the only way I could get laid was to be raped. I said yes to partners I never wanted in the first place, because to say no at any point after saying yes for so long would make our entire relationship a lie, so I had to keep saying yes in order to keep the “no” I felt a secret. This is such a messed-up way to live, such an awful way to love.

So these days, I say yes only when I mean yes.

The sex-positive feminist movement shared the ideal that we could recover from this awful sensibility, the internalized degradation Cho named so well. It’s strange to think of that era now, from the vantage of 2025. I’ve heard people say that sex-positive feminism ultimately dominated American culture. I totally disagree. What we have now is very far from healthy sexual culture; sexual culture in 2025 does not feel feminist to me, nor positive. A certain kind of sex is certainly more in-your-face than ever, but I never felt like sex-positive feminism “won,” not in the ways that we dreamed about.

I wanted more healthy exploration and sharing, for everyone, but especially for women. My writing as Clarisse Thorn helped some people find that in their own lives, and I’m grateful for that. But oh, it is so tragic and terrible to see where my country is now, especially when it comes to gender, sex, and relationships.

So that was why I was so passionate about the sex-positive feminist movement. Some people learn about my work at Clarisse and are disgusted. Despite the many attempts to shame me for it, I am not ashamed. A huge part of me, maybe most of me, still loves feminism and roots for its success—despite other parts of me becoming conscious, oh so conscious, of its drawbacks.

Baby’s First Cancellation

By 2011, I’d been writing under the name Clarisse since 2008. I knew my way around feminism, or so I thought.

However, it upset me that the movement kept canceling people. I didn’t think everyone who was canceled deserved it, but some of my friends did. I complained about it privately and my feminist friends kept talking me down.

I learned all the relevant arguments backwards and forwards. Didn’t I want women to be safe and free? Didn’t I want accountability for predators? Of course I wanted those things. So I kept my mouth shut as the problems of cancel culture mounted.

What bothered me most was that there seemed to be no grace, no possibility for a canceled person to recover or make amends—not even anything resembling a “fair hearing” that a person could request once targeted by the cancel mob. Additionally, the cancellation process seemed unfairly harsh for any but very serious crimes. In other words, cancellation struck me as a punishment that didn’t fit most crimes it was used for. Moreover, even when applied to bad cases, the process seemed counterproductive for the community using it; most people who’d been canceled shifted away from social justice norms or left the movement entirely, and sometimes took their friends with them. All these effects seemed destructive and wrong, but saying anything publicly was clearly dangerous for one’s reputation and sanity.

Then the forces of cancellation came for someone I knew. He had done some awful things, but had also publicly written about his regrets, and about efforts to make up for those past actions. I finally took a stand, saying that I thought cancellation was messed up. My core questions were: “Do you believe people can change? And if you do believe it, then how would you help someone change?”

When I wrote that, I was angry. I felt like I was about ready to throw in the towel with internet feminism. On some level, I knew it would blow up in my face, and it did.

Some of the critiques were reasonable, but much of what was said about me was, uh, definitely not reasoned. Many internet feminists eagerly jumped on the bandwagon of calling me a slut, albeit in more colorful terms. They claimed I had slept with the man who was their primary cancellation target (I hadn’t) and they left graphic commentary across the internet about my supposed sexual misdeeds (ironic given that we weren’t supposed to judge each other for our sexuality, right?).

Any insult was fair game and no one cared about principles once the feeding frenzy was on. As internet fury mounted against me, I spent three full days crying hysterically. One of those days was Christmas Eve, and my mom tried to get me to go to church, where she was helping with the service; I was unable to stop crying long enough to quietly watch the service, so she had to put me in a back room to cry alone. At the frenzy’s peak, I lost concrete opportunities and money, like a speaking engagement at Harvard. I’d been scheduled to give a talk there, but Harvard folded under the public pressure and uninvited me.

People I thought were my friends, including people I helped establish themselves in the internet feminism world, subtweeted me and made forum threads about me.4 But the worst came from people who didn’t know me at all, who seemingly wanted a punching bag. In late 2011, I broke my neck in a bicycle accident, with a long recovery process. A prominent feminist led a Tumblr thread where people posted their spite about me, full of comments saying my life-threatening accident was hilarious—all while I was in recovery.5

At the same time, when I go back and review it all today, it strikes me how much I disagree with some things I said. Some critiques that adorned my cancellation were correct! For example, a writer named Maia at a blog called Alas! A Blog wrote a response to me at the time. Even back then, I took it seriously; I got it reposted at one of the big feminist blogs to increase its audience. As Maia wrote, “I have known far more perpetrators who were trying to persuade people that they were genuinely trying to change, than those who have genuinely tried to change.”

Today, over a decade later, I relate even more to what Maia wrote. If I’d had more lived experience of abusive relationships back in 2011, then I doubt I would have said what I said. Abusers have huge incentives to lie about whether they have changed, and many of them do. I didn’t understand that before, not in the way that I understand it now. Plus, the backlash in 2011 usefully pointed me to the discipline of transformative justice.6

The most confusing part of being canceled is that it’s hard to figure out which parts are “deserved” and should lead to personal change, and which are unfair. Post-cancellation, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I pulled myself together and published my book, Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men. It had been hotly anticipated, and was an immediate success. It hit number one in both its Amazon categories, sex and feminism, for a full week after its debut. During the release, I attended SXSW for the first time to give a talk. There I was invited to a private party for famous internet feminists.

Maybe, I thought, this was my chance. Maybe I wasn’t permanently canceled after all?

When I walked into the party, I was nervous. Everyone in that room saw my cancellation play out over Twitter, Tumblr, and blog comments. I assumed everyone was mad. No internet feminists had reached out with a kind word. Many had been actively mean! But, I quickly realized, they were all super nice to my face. In fact, some of the women at that party told me they were sorry about what had happened, that they’d experienced similar toxic mobs, and that I didn’t do anything wrong. Again, these were people who did not say a thing, privately or publicly, to help me when the cancellation went down.

I felt torn between disgust at the methods of cancellation, and a true desire to learn from my cancellation. And yet I realized, talking to the women in that room, that many of them did not share this desire. Many dismissed the concerns of their own followers.

I realized, too, that many now respected me because I was poised to come back stronger than ever. My book was an obvious success, I had a real audience, and that was what mattered to them: an independent audience was power. What I understood then, on that evening, was that this was not about principles or shared moral convictions, nor was it solidarity. It was basically a private club of powerful women. The baseline philosophy was “might makes right.”

Worse, the club benefited from cancellation. It helped them stay at the top.7 That was the thing that disgusted me so much that ultimately I could not bring myself to publicly rejoin the movement. “The club” let newcomers run into the cancellation buzzsaw while watching to see if they survived, and if the newbies didn’t? Well, then there was less competition for the women in that room! Supporting a canceled feminist was a calculation made afterwards, based on whether she made it through the experience.

I didn’t leave immediately. I went back and forth about it. Was it fair to judge the internet social justice community for its behavior during cancellations, given that cancellations were admittedly confusing? Also, cancellations are often a bottom-up process, though many prominent people devise ways to orchestrate or incite them. So maybe it made sense that leaders were prone to letting them happen. Nobody was in control of the process.

When I tried to think about what might be better, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like I had a better system. Selfishly, I was also grateful to have been invited to the party, grateful on a personal level for how some internet feminists, in the end, tried to be kind.

Eventually, I concluded that while I was not sure what social mechanisms would be better, I could not continue participating in a movement where cancel culture was so prevalent. Crucially, I also saw that many of the real-life feminists I knew—women with meatspace jobs that helped women in crisis—felt that internet feminism was interesting yet toxic. So eventually, I published the books I’d planned to publish in 2012 and moved on.

I kept some of my friends from the feminist movement. I generally believed in social justice principles, so I stayed connected, just wasn’t as vocal. I watched #MeToo go down, and despite my distaste for cancellation, I was mostly glad that there seemed to be a kind of justice—finally—for serial abusers like Harvey Weinstein. I wanted people like Weinstein to fear the mob because maybe then, I thought, they would stop hurting others.

Then, in 2020, when I witnessed the Black Lives Matter riots and saw that many social justice people defended the violence, I began wondering if the movement was morally vacant. Plus, cancellation reached new highs during that time, and its penalties were worse than ever. There were examples like Amy Cooper, who was forced into hiding after a dog-related confrontation in Central Park went viral; there was the mounting toll of random and clueless people who lost their jobs for social justice offenses, many of whom were themselves lower-class people of color. The song “Fake Woke” charted in early 2021 because it was a clear representation of public feelings regarding the divisive hypocrisy of it all. It was now obvious that, to many Americans, wokeness appeared pointless at best and to serve the powerful at worst. But what hit me hardest was seeing real violence mount in American cities while many left-wing commentators defended, even glorified it.

I had to finally ask myself: could it be that the social justice movement was making things worse?—or, did too many people in the movement care more about their careers than their principles? That was when I got involved in the right-wing neoreactionary movement, also known as NRx.

I knew people would be shocked by my public shift towards NRx. I had some sense of what it would cost me. But by the time I became publicly affiliated with NRx, I was so infuriated by the social justice left—by its hypocrisies; by its refusal to moderate its extremists, no matter how much harm they do; by its lack of care towards people who needed our help, including people harmed by the riots—that I thought it was plausible the right wing was a better place to invest my energy.

This turned out to be incorrect. Sadly, there were more rude awakenings in store.

Canceled Right and Left

When I dusted myself off post-cancellation in 2011-2012, I tried to double down on friends who seemed less political. I thought they would have better community principles. I spent a long time prioritizing friendship with people who mostly weren’t involved in politics at all. And yet much later, in 2021, when my engagement to Curtis Yarvin was announced, I experienced the same poisonous bullying from a decade ago.

To this day, people sometimes ask me at dinner parties, “Did you really love him?” as if it’s too incomprehensible to be real. For the record, I want nothing to do with Curtis today—you can read my feelings on his New Yorker profile here—but of course I loved him! I was not planning to marry someone I didn’t love!

At the time, I had reason to believe Curtis loved me too, and that he wanted the best for me. When Curtis and I were together, we did all the couple things: we walked on beaches together; we cried in each other’s arms. Curtis called me “the thinking man’s trophy wife,” which I found so hilarious that it was in my Twitter bio for a while. He compared me to goddesses and mythic heroines, and he said things like, “Achilles would rather have you than Troy.” He introduced me to all his friends, said repeatedly I was The One, wrote extensive poetry about me. By the time we were engaged, I thought I understood him. I wanted to marry the man I thought I knew. I was willing to tolerate the immense backlash I got for our engagement because I loved him.

Rightly or wrongly, when we were together, I also saw Great Spiritual Meaning in all of it. I agreed to marry Curtis partially because I believed there were vast mimetic implications to our union. I thought that in our fractured society, there might be a political leadership role played by a couple that could embody a wholly different political philosophy and a sincere truth-seeking effort. So I felt that our relationship was bigger than just the two of us. That made me more willing to cope with the backlash, too.

Just like before, I expected it and it was worse than I expected. For weeks, whenever I opened Facebook, I saw threads of my Facebook friends openly trash talking me or “being concerned about me”8 without tagging me, the equivalent of a Facebook subtweet. I wondered if they knew I was seeing all of this, so in one thread, I posted a comment noting that I could see what they were saying. Commenters on the thread indicated they didn’t care, or that they were even glad that I was reading their comments because they thought I deserved it (although some apologized later).

The most amazing example was when people—some of them people I had collaborated with—started leaving mean comments directly on my Facebook engagement announcement. I deleted most of those comments, but I didn’t delete all of them because I was trying to accept and internalize critique. Nevertheless, when I started deleting some of the negative comments, including comments that said nothing but “ugh,” there were commenters lashed out at me further, self-righteously informing me I was failing to “take accountability” for my misdeeds because I was deleting toxic personal comments from my public engagement announcement. Seriously?

Weirdly, however, the public backlash turned out to be the easy part. My situation had all the same dynamics as when I was canceled in internet feminism, but new dynamics were added: some people tried to get close to me because Curtis is rich and famous, including people who publicly hated him. There were liberals—people who attacked Curtis publicly—who privately tried to find ways to access Curtis (and Curtis’s money and Curtis’s clout) through me. Others exhibited performative fury about conservatives or made moral judgments about me behind my back, then turned around and asked me to introduce them to Peter Thiel.

One time during my engagement, I was hanging out with a friend who oversaw a cultural hub that I loved, and my friend asked me to get Curtis to fund the space. This was wild because Curtis was banned from that space—a fact that caused me frequent headaches, given that Curtis was my fiancé and I spent a lot of time there. This friend didn’t appear to see the problem at all. They genuinely thought it was fine to ban Curtis from their space and then ask me to get Curtis’s money to fund it.9 I had more than one interaction like this.

I was disgusted by the moral flexibility that suddenly appeared when so many of my liberal friends came close to money and fame. I almost preferred the people who blasted cancellation poison. I began to wonder whether only a minority of my liberal friends had anything resembling consistent integrity.

But there was worse to come. During my engagement to Curtis, he asked me to have his child, and then during my pregnancy, Curtis and I broke up in rather scandalous circumstances. Curtis then sued me two weeks after I gave birth, which severely damaged both my health and my personal finances. Eventually I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from the entire sordid situation.

At this juncture it’s worth noting that people like to speculate about sexuality in my relationship with Curtis. Of course they do. It’s the internet, right? The fact that I have done a lot of BDSM somehow relates to what happened between me and Curtis. This becomes a reason it was okay for me to be hurt so badly. Some of the jokes are funny, I must admit, like the comment suggesting I was locking him in a “BDSM cuck shed” (I was not). But this aspect remains frustrating for me, given my ideals as a sex-positive feminist.

Anyway, Curtis and I didn’t do BDSM as part of our relationship, so all the weird commentary about this is irrelevant. I also think it’s interesting that the single most traumatic outcome of my life happened after I tried to marry a conservative guy who repeatedly insisted that he was monogamous and vanilla. I’ve never had anything remotely this bad happen in any of my BDSM relationships; I’ve never been diagnosed with PTSD after a BDSM relationship either. Indeed, one of the biggest and best-designed studies on BDSM found no broader correlation between abusive experiences and BDSM desires. So, while I am open to in-depth discussions of BDSM and psychology and whatever else is relevant, I’m not sure my relationship with Curtis has anything to do with it.

After I gave birth and Curtis sued me, I was in a position where I had a newborn baby, and I was in a health and financial crisis, and I’d lost some support from my liberal community. I would love to be able to tell you that the conservative community rescued me! But it didn’t.

One thing I’ve heard experts say about PTSD is that the moment of trauma is not the moment of pain. It is the moment of feeling alone with it.

It wasn’t like I thought the conservative movement was perfect. It seemed obvious that conservative leaders were just as bad, maybe worse, at taking audience feedback, compared to what I’d seen in the social justice world. But what I learned after giving birth was that, despite all the public insistence that they care about family and motherhood, only a minority of my conservative friends helped a real, live single mother when I appeared in their midst. And over the ensuing years I saw that many ran a similar calculation as left-wing careerists did. To them, I would be worthy of open support only after I demonstrated that I was strong enough to have a comeback, on my own, without their help.

I’ve often heard “the people who show up in a crisis are not the people you expect.” That was my experience, too.

I met truly excellent people in both of these political movements. Some were precisely the people I thought would help me in extremis, and others people I never thought I’d ally with, but who displayed great strength of character in helping me, even though I wasn’t the kind of person they had any reason to respect or believe. Some Christians have been so supportive of me in my single mother journey. Who would have thought anyone on the religious right would work through their disgust enough to be kind to Clarisse Thorn? I’m grateful for that.

And so as I emerged from this personal darkness and confronted how simplistic my idea of community used to be, my next question became: what would it mean for all of us to support each other better?

What Now?

A phrase emerged in the last decade, virtue signaling. It’s the conspicuous display of ethical or political awareness; a performance instead of action. If you’d asked me fifteen years ago what percentage of virtue signaling correlated with real virtue, I would have said 80 to 90 percent; if you’d asked me five years ago, I would have said maybe 20 percent; today I’d estimate it at, like, five percent. Maybe five percent.

I used to decide who to hang out with based largely on intellect and critique. I used to select for people who could speak clearly about social dynamics or morality. But when the chips are down, perception and eloquence do not, in fact, correlate with morality. I feel like I’m still getting my bearings about what integrity means in a world that feels ever more corrupt, but one thing I know: I respect wise action more than ever, and brilliant words less than ever. Maybe that’s a strange position for a writer, but that’s how I feel now.

From now on I want to do good work, take care of my family, and live a healthy life. And I want to link up with other people who prioritize their integrity too, independent of politics.

I believe we can build better communities that genuinely support their members through experiences like these, and that it will be the work of lifetimes, especially in this lonely era. I’m hoping my history will help me contribute to that goal. That’s one of the silver linings.

Lydia Laurenson is a researcher, editor, and writer, described as a “reporter on the future of the human heart and mind.” Find her work on Substack at Solar Light.

Thank you for reading Season 4 of The Ick! See the full season archive here.

Stay tuned for announcements about the forthcoming print magazine + live reading in San Francisco. Help us offset printing costs and get an advanced copy by subscribing ($0-$250).

Subscribe now

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Next up, Rhys co-authors a comic with Midjourney about the anthropological origins and future of disgust.

Author’s note: I prompted most of the illustrations in Midjourney, edited them in Comic Life 3 or Photoshop, then arranged them with my written dialogue in InDesign. Thanks to Emily for feedback and direction, to the internet and AI for research help, and to my cat Diego for snuggles.

Further Reading

• From Stability to Inconsistency: A Study of Moral Preferences in LLMs by Jotautaite et al

• The Other Side by Nicky Case

• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Rhys Lindmark is the founder of Roote. He’s making videos on How Everything Evolved and writing comics at Ada & Locke.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Next up, Kit recounts her adventures in sex work activism in New Orleans, and the triumphs and disillusionment along the journey to justice.

In March 2020, I got my nose pierced at Downtown Tattoo on Frenchmen Street. It was their Friday the 13th special.

Later, I went to work a private party with my colleague—she’d booked us a bachelor party of Michigan men visiting New Orleans. The warning bells of COVID had begun ringing, but the shutdown hadn’t been declared yet. I remember we made a little game out of saucily rubbing hand sanitizer on their hands before we gave them a lap dance.

It seems dumb now, but I, like many people, feel ashamed of the things I did in early COVID. I will never feel shame for working as a stripper, or for getting a piercing that occasionally bled while I grinded on some dude’s lap—but I do feel disgust for the leftists who turned their backs on me.

I can tell you where you got those Pleasers

In 2020, I’d spent a few years working at strip clubs on Bourbon Street. I was going to school part-time and playing in a band, so it seemed like the best way to make money and keep a flexible schedule. Plus, I liked it, as much as I can like any job. I liked the performance, the money, all of that.

The seasons were unpredictable, so I started branching out. During the big money times like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest I’d taken a couple full-service clients. One week I made over three grand in eight hours. I’d made decent money dancing, but never that much.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t love the work. I’m not going to pretend that it was all feminism rah rah empowerment. The money did make me feel powerful, but the work was essentially a balancing act between letting (mostly) men objectify me while convincing them to pay. I wouldn’t call it degrading, but it was hard to keep my facial expressions locked away as I tried to give the customers what they wanted.

While dancing was physically exhausting—shin bruises from the pole, creaking knees from Hustler Club’s granite stage—escorting was much more emotionally taxing. I once got booked for a six-hour date where we spent most of the time cuddling. I couldn’t stand being touched for a week afterward.

I probably would have gotten more desensitized if I’d continued, but it was the emails that really broke me. The gig culture made me feel like I was always leaving money on the table, always worried a dry spell was around the corner. I had to be ready to slot a date into my schedule with little notice. I was constantly monitoring my inbox.

When the lockdown hit, all that was over. Every virtual option for sex work either required advanced pole dancing skills (which I don’t have) or the dreaded administrative work needed to run an Only Fans (you know how I feel about emails).

In the first months of quarantine, I had a pretty typical experience: I doomscrolled, I rewatched TV shows, I tried and abandoned workout routines. I found a lot of solace in online communities.

One day on Instagram, I saw a local nonprofit was hiring sex workers and allies for a project. They were going to bring a decriminalization bill to the Louisiana legislature. The work was part time but paid well, so I joined.

If I’d thought the emails were the worst part of sex work, I wasn’t ready for the emotional labor of social justice.

A short history of sex work advocacy

For the next year, we worked remotely to pull together research and testimonials. We recruited community members, professionals, and politicians to our cause. Our bill wasn’t about making new laws, it was about repealing old ones—10 anti-sex work statutes to be exact. That’s the decriminalization strategy: charges can’t be brought against sex workers if there’s no law to violate.

It was a long shot, but the world felt like it was changing. Crowds were marching in the streets all over the country. They were organizing en masse to demand defunding police and reallocating money to communities. People were tired of the same old, same old and they weren’t going to stay silent anymore. We knew it probably wouldn’t pass—this was Louisiana after all. New Orleans had a bit of a salacious reputation, but the rest of the state was less interested in laisser les bon temps rouler.

In the 20th century, there were two major attempts to suppress prostitution in Louisiana. Red light districts were first shut down during World War I, when they were pronounced a public health threat to soldiers and sailors. The same rhetoric was used during World War II, when a military commander blamed New Orleans for the increase in venereal disease among troops. Colonel Halloran kicked off an anti-prostitution campaign that likened sex workers to agents of the Axis.

Decades later, in 2018, a joint task force raided Bourbon Street strip clubs—ostensibly to investigate human trafficking and prostitution. This led to the creation of new police oversight in New Orleans, the Bourbon Alliance of Responsible Entertainers (BARE). In 2020, when we endeavored to bring decriminalization to the State, everyone was glued to their phones. Something as audacious as a repeal of anti-prostitution laws would definitely make headlines, so at least we could start the conversation.

The work was hard for me. I was sick of Zoom, everything moved slowly, every decision needed consensus. We painstakingly edited our info packet line by line via screenshare.

Around this time, a friend of mine suggested starting a leftist reading group for sex workers. This was much more invigorating than packet edits. We read the foundational texts of Lenin, Trotsky, and Marx. Then we delved into the queer writers of the 20th century like Leslie Feinberg and Judith Butler, as well as foundational philosophers like Foucault, Fischer, and Parenti.

We found a podcaster that demystified historical texts like State and Revolution and The Transitional Program. This podcast made the readings accessible and helped everyone feel able to participate.

I was awash with ideas and excitement during such a dark time. All of these great thinkers were putting words to feelings I’d had and were showing me a path forward. Solidarity, comrades, abolitionists—we were all in it together. When everything seemed shrouded in uncertainty, it gave me a sort of faith. I wasn’t passively quarantining, I was participating in a revolution.

Sex work was still a divisive topic, but I now had the vocabulary to defend it.

One of the pillars of the leftist ideology is the importance of the Worker. Sex work was exploitative, certainly, but no more than any physically laborious job. The fact that sex organs were involved was a question of morality, and should not hold weight in arguments against the labor itself. The work traded on the norms of the patriarchy, but that was a systemic problem, not an individual one.

So how could we fix the system? There are three main frameworks for sex work advocacy: the Nordic model, legalization, and decriminalization.

The Nordic Model criminalizes pimps and johns, not the sex worker. Most leftists agree the person buying sex should face the legal consequences. This seems fair, right? However, studies show placing the legal risk on clients makes it harder for sex workers to negotiate price and safety. If you’re safe from arrest but your client isn’t, your bargaining power shrinks. When a nervous john insists on meeting somewhere isolated or skipping condoms, you’re more likely to agree—because refusing could mean losing the money, and you have bills to pay.

Legalization also has its downfalls. Take Nevada for example, where sex work is legal. The process of licensure is incredibly difficult, and requires a spotless criminal background and negative status on all STIs. The stringent requirements leads to a lot of illegal sex work which can be just as dangerous if not moreso. If one does manage to obtain a license and a position, the brothels are essentially modern day company towns. Workers have little choice when it comes to food, rent, and weekly STI screenings. Brothel owners are free to line their own pockets with withheld wages for expenses.

Decriminalization is the most harm reductive approach, and evidence supports this.1 Decrim is the only option that empowers the worker, allowing them to seek health or legal assistance without fear. Decrim means workers could transition out of the industry with a clean criminal record.

Certainly well-reasoned people would be persuaded by these rational arguments. I was armed and ready for verbal sparring at the drop of a hat.

We’d started with a goal to start the conversation, maybe the bill would make it out of the Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice. But I was beginning to dream that Louisiana could pull off what no other state had. The momentum was intoxicating. I started to hope we could win.

A Marxist goes to the Capitol

Caught up in my radical hopefulness, I decided to join a revolutionary leftist organization. In 2021, I even spent the cancelled Mardi Gras weekend attending their Marxist school. There were plenty of people in the org who shared my views concerning sex work, but the man who did my onboarding interview was not one of them.

Sex workers were welcome to join, he said, but we would be the weakest link. “Having members who engage in criminal activity might paint a target on us,” he said. After all, Marx labeled sex workers and drug dealers the lumpenproletariat, who were “bribed tools of the reactionary intrigue.”

“When we bring the work above ground,” he said, “we may not be able to afford members who break the law.”

Still, I had a head full of theory and was ready to debate, so I joined anyway, assuming I could change some hearts and minds along the way.

“Marx wrote that 150 years ago,” I said to my friend Alex from the leftist reading group. “We’ve come a long way since then, right?”

Alex shook her head. “I’m too tired to keep having these conversations,” she moaned.

But I wasn’t too tired. Not yet, anyway.

On May 4th, we were finally ready to present our bill in Baton Rouge.

I remember it was already pretty warm for spring. I don’t remember what I wore now—I changed my outfit three times at 5:30 a.m.—but I do remember being worried about sweat stains.

I was nervous about what the opposition would bring, worried they would drown us out. But the turn out was insane. We had so many people come to speak in favor of our bill that they had to cut off the list of speakers. Everyone else contributed little green squares to show solidarity: 200 green squares (in favor) versus 40 red ones (against). People were standing in the aisles and in the back because there weren’t enough chairs in the chamber. There were many sex workers who showed up, as well as health care professionals, lawyers, and business owners. The biggest score was a former anti-trafficking agent who described sting operations where sex workers were pressured to say they’d been trafficked, so the task force could falsely justify their work.

Everyone spoke clearly, spoke powerfully, spoke from the heart. The voices in solidarity drowned out the few dozen in dissent. After hours of testimony, we sat back. We waited with bated breath as the legislators took the microphone.

“I, uhh, move we vote?” one representative said, a baffled look on his face. This was probably the first time he’d heard anyone talk about prostitution as something other than a sad, societal blight.

All the representatives were silent, looking at one another, hesitant to second the motion. Then one suggested with more certainty, “What if we move for further study?”

The representatives loved that, a deferment of their responsibility as public servants. The motion passed easily, and it was over. I sat there in disbelief.

We had lost. And not only that, but they had placed us in bureaucratic limbo. We were welcome to join the study, whenever that happened, but that would mean sitting in a room full of police officers and outing ourselves with our legal names.

I tried to hold onto hope, to remind myself that movements take time. We’d done something amazing, and the turn out was proof we were doing something that resonated with the people of Louisiana.

Then, the final blow came.

The sex work ick

On May 11th, one week after Baton Rouge, my favorite leftist podcast released a sex work and proletariat feminism episode. I felt excited as I hit play, certain that this was a continuation of the national momentum I’d been feeling. What I heard made my heart sink.

The guests on the podcast introduced themselves as “survivors of the sex trade.” This should have been my first clue. No doubt they had truly tragic backstories. Both had felt trapped in the work, and their time in the industry showcased the unacceptable treatment of sex workers.

They talked about the recent slate of pro-sex work rhetoric as some neoliberal, petite bourgeoisie movement. I was so confused. I had worked for decrim alongside diverse, dedicated people, most of whom did not come from privileged backgrounds. They gave a whole year of their lives to work on this bill. They knew that even passing the bill wouldn’t win the battle, just provide a harm-reductive stopgap. These were not the petite bourgeoisie, these were revolutionaries and abolitionists.

“The moment you rely on the sex trade to pay your bills, pay your rent, to feed yourself, consent is out of the question,” one of the guests asserted. “The only people that actually do this out of their own free will are those who are independently wealthy.”

I kept expecting the host to push back on this analysis, to offer some interrogation of these sweeping statements, but nothing came.

“The Western left seems to only cherish the free market when it comes to the buying and selling of women’s bodies. The capitalist class will do anything in their power to control the narratives of all industries.”

If sex workers do the job full time, they can’t consent? These were the most insulting, infantilizing takes I’d ever heard. Under capitalism, no worker is truly free to quit at will, yet this doesn’t erase our personal agency.

Also, “selling women’s bodies” is so dehumanizing. No one “bought” my body—no one got to take it home with them at the end of the night and keep it on a shelf. However, the podcast guests preemptively shut down any counterargument by claiming that the very idea of choice in sex work is just a capitalist psy-op.

The reading group Discord blew up. We were so angry that we’d been promoting this podcast to our sex worker peers only to have the host turn on us. While on previous topics he’d been very willing to engage in discourse on Twitter, he shut down any arguments on this one. He tweeted something along the lines of “if you have a problem with my recent episode, write down your thoughts, seal them in an envelope, and throw them straight into the trash.”

Naive little me, I still expected a retraction. I thought the host would get enough DMs and replies that he’d entertain another perspective.

Like in Baton Rouge, we were telling everyone what we wanted, and they just acted like they couldn’t understand. The more I learned how to debate these things thoughtfully and rationally, the more frustrated I became that no one was listening. My fellow sex workers were some of the most well-spoken and well-read people I’d ever met, yet their perfectly-crafted arguments fell on deaf ears.

“Why can’t they just hear us when we say this stuff?” I asked the people in my reading group. “We’ve learned all this theory, why can’t we bring them around?”

“They think we’re icky,” Alex said plainly.

It was so simple, and devastating. That statement encapsulated the powerlessness I’d struggled with in all my efforts.

There is an ingrained revulsion when it comes to sex work. You, reader, may be feeling it right now. We’ve had a lot of bad press, from the U.S. military to Christian fundamentalism, to plain old misogyny. This disgust response makes it too easy for leftists to slip into hypocrisy. The villainizing propaganda has dug in deep. Whether sex workers are enemies of feminism, or tools for the Nazis, we just can’t be trusted.

Sure, sex work can be gross—it’s often unpleasant, dangerous, and dirty. But so is coal mining, oil drilling, and farming—but leftists are desperate to get those workers on their side. Even the most environmentally destructive industries are given the grace to be replaced by degrees in most Socialist models. I doubt any leftist recruiters warned oil workers would be a liability when the revolution comes.

There’s a meme going around on lefty social media as our economic situation gets more precarious. It’s something along the lines of “if you see someone stealing food…no you didn’t.” And I agree with the sentiment, but feel like these nuances get applied unequally. Stealing and selling drugs is illegal, but I never hear former thieves or dealers come onto a podcast to preach the harms these criminal activities have on the leftist movement.

Despite all this, the sex workers of New Orleans are inching closer to justice. Just this spring, May 2025, a soft version of decriminalization passed in the city, but the rest of Louisiana has no such committees nor protections.

This is good, but for me it’s not nearly good enough. I don’t think I’ll be satisfied until no one is left out in the cold, no matter what kind of work they do. The Marxist organization where I was a member disbanded in 2024, and reformed under a new name. Could this rebrand signal a change of heart on the topic of sex work? If that’s the case, they know where to find me.

I haven’t given up on the Cause, but I lost hope in the Movement. Communists and socialists need to overcome a century of negative rhetoric, so maybe it’s time to reassess the guiding principles. If the revolution comes and you don’t want to include everyone, what are you really fighting for?

Sex workers have courageously pointed out this hypocrisy to the Louisiana legislature, and podcast hosts, but I guess we’re just too icky to listen to.

Kateleen is a writer and artist. You can find her on Substack, Threads, or her website.

Further reading

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

The History of Sex Work in Louisiana, Women with a Vision

Is Sex Work Decriminalization the Answer? What the Research Tells Us, ACLU

Why Sex Work Should Be Decriminalized, Human Rights Watch

Today’s article is from me, Emily, and it’s definitely a disgusting subject. Content warning: gut stuff, eating disorders.

Making mayonnaise is disgusting.

I learned this in 2021, when I was pouring olive oil directly into a blender. As I looked down into the spinning blades, I was forced to acknowledge mayo is just a fatty goop made entirely of oil and egg. Watching it emulsify into milky slime, I felt sick.

I’d been feeling sick since I was 18, actually. I was battling crippling bowel distress caused by a long list of possible allergens. Flare-ups would blindside me without pattern or warning. By the time I was 21, I’d had more colonoscopies than most middle-aged men, and still the diagnosis came back null. Well, not null exactly. My chart said IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, but this diagnosis is functionally meaningless.

On this day in 2021, I was finally allowed to eat eggs. I was one week into an elimination diet, testing for food allergies, and eggs had just been cleared for reintroduction.

That’s how I found myself making mayonnaise from scratch. Elimination diets work by cutting out all major allergens—soy, dairy, gluten, etc—then adding them back one at a time to see how the body responds. The early phase was brutal: mostly rice and meat, a few plain vegetables and fruits, and absolutely no sauces, spices, condiments, or sweets. The preservatives and additives in store-bought brands like Hellman’s would pollute the experiment. The goal was to keep the data clean and variables low.

In the end, though, I didn’t determine any new allergies. My symptoms returned. This might seem like a failure. But in a strange and backwards way, I healed something else: my eating disorder. And I became an evangelist for gut science.

Everyone has IBS now

IBS is problematic because it's poorly understood and difficult to diagnose. There is no biological marker. It is diagnosed by symptoms only, so many people labeled with IBS are actually suffering from a different condition with overlapping symptoms.1

Women seem to be especially susceptible. A global meta-analysis found women had ~50 percent higher odds of IBS than men. Correlation and causation are a mess, notably in women with eating disorders who frequently experience other related conditions such as anxiety and depression.

Many people with IBS, like me, experience a sudden onset of symptoms in early adulthood. In my 20s, I ran the gauntlet with gastroenterologists, nutritionists, dieticians, and allergists to find a cure. I was prescribed psyllium husk, loperamide, probiotics, antibiotics, cholestyramine, depression meds—but nothing worked for long.

In my 30s, I talked to a friend who had sudden digestive turmoil similar to mine, and hers turned out to be parasites. She gave me the name of her practitioner, Dr. M, and I called right away. Dr. M specialized in uncommon causes like tapeworms, Candida yeast overgrowth, and parasites—things my Western medicine providers had never tested for.

She had me try things that felt refreshingly unconventional. I sent a bowel sample to Kenya. I got my DNA sequenced. I had the colors and textures of my tongue analyzed. I tried acupuncture and Chinese herbs. I learned about doshas and ate according to Ayurveda. I drank two gallons of white oak bark tea every week. Much of the work we did together was to “starve” the possible tapeworm or “bad” bacteria. Over time, I began to see my gut as a battlefield, invaded by aliens and toxins, and I was losing.

Reader, I did not have a tapeworm.

After a full year with Dr. M, she told me bluntly: “I’ve tried everything. There’s nothing else I can do.” She gave me the name of a hypnotherapist, “You’re probably just stressed.”

Is it stress?

I took the name of the hypnotherapist, but I was bitter. I felt blamed and alone. I went to one hypnosis appointment, but the therapist was a little too keen on Joe Dispenza and past-life regression. I didn’t go back.

Meta-analyses estimate 14 percent of people globally suffer from IBS. Are these hundreds of millions of people “just stressed”? Is IBS just all in our head?

“The answer is yes,” writes Natasha Boyd in The Drift, “once you realize the head is also in the stomach.”

You’ve probably heard that the gut is your second brain. But “second brain” isn’t exactly right. The gut is a neurochemical command center that interacts with the brain as a peer.

Understanding this really rocked my sense of body and self. I used to roll my eyes at Dr. M when she urged me to “meditate with my gut”. “Put your hands on your belly,” she said, “and ask it, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’” It sounded absurd, until I learned how much the ENS operates outside of conscious awareness.

The walls of our gastrointestinal tract are latticed with 100–500 million neurons, collectively called the enteric nervous system (ENS). This network coordinates gut motility, pain signaling, and inflammatory responses without any input from your “main” brain. It’s effectively an autonomous nervous system for digestion, tuned to monitor what’s happening inside our gut and decide what signals to send upstairs to the grey matter. And where do these neurons get their information? From the trillions of microbes living in your intestines.

There are approximately 30 to 40 trillion microbes in the digestive tract—nearly equal to the number of human cells in the body. They are so deeply wired into gut-brain communication that scientists now consider these microbes co-authors of our moods, cravings, even our personality.

Bacteria are determining my personality? Give me a break, right, I know. But consider that the gut is responsible for synthesizing key mood-regulating neurochemicals (~90 percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the gut!). And new science is finding conditions like depression, anxiety, acne2, Schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's3 have distinct microbiota signatures. Our microbiome is in charge of our happiness, our sadness, maybe even our cognitive resilience or decline.

So how is stress involved? Cortisol is the main culprit. Stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the body’s central stress response system, triggering a cascade of hormones—cortisol chief among them. Cortisol binds to glucocorticoid receptors, causing changes in the proteins that normally seal the gut lining. When these tight junctions loosen, the gut becomes more permeable (commonly called “leaky gut” a truly disgusting phrase, sorry), letting bacteria, toxins, and undigested particles pass into the bloodstream, triggering inflammation.4

In parallel, stress disrupts the balance of microbes themselves. The inflammatory response decreases diversity and encourages the overgrowth of harmful bacteria (“dysbiosis”).

So yes, stress precipitates and perpetuates IBS symptoms. For me, the constant search for the cause—what am I doing wrong? too much sugar? not enough fiber? too many FODMAPs??—created a vicious cycle of food restriction and body dysmorphia.

It might not surprise you that 90 percent of women with eating disorders are diagnosed with IBS. This is the part left unsaid in the sardonic meme “hot girls have stomach issues”. Correlation or causation is uncertain, but the theory is that eating in disordered patterns disrupts the balance of gut flora. And the stress associated with hyperfixation around food or body image leads to further gut disruption.

Eating disorder or whatever

I have never been clinically diagnosed with an eating disorder. Different psychotherapists have raised the alarm over the years, but I’ve never been medicated or hospitalized. Eating disorders are a spectrum, with “worried about ice cream” on one end, and “food obsession and social isolation” on the other. I’ve slid around on the spectrum a lot in my life, but by 2021, as I was making mayonnaise in my kitchen, I was in a very bad place.

Coming of age in the early 2000s was brutal for my body image. If you didn’t live through it, let me give you a snapshot of the climate. America was experiencing a collective anxiety attack about obesity. After decades of rising rates of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, fat had become a public enemy. Nutrition science was blindly groping around for the cause—oh, it’s saturated fats, oh no actually it’s LDL cholesterol, nope scratch that it’s carbohydrates—stoking confusion and panic. Meanwhile, the diet-industrial complex was making billions. Our moms microwaved Lean Cuisines and refused cake at our birthday parties. Schools were federally mandated to remove whole milk and vending machines from the cafeteria.

In 2001, I was a ballet dancer who watched a lot of America’s Next Top Model. I was doomed.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I was binge eating. Food thoughts dominated my day, dictated my mood, and isolated me socially—red flags that indicated I was moving along the spectrum from “disordered eating” to “eating disorder”. However, these feelings about food were always tied, confusingly, to my allergies.

“Good” foods, I thought, were rainbow vegetables and leafy greens full of fiber. Healthy and nutrient-dense. Who could be allergic to “good foods” like that? “Bad” foods were carbs and fat: baked goods, oily meats, full-fat dairy, all sugars.

I was constantly “body checking”—a behavior I now know is characteristic of body dysmorphia—scrutinizing my different body parts in the mirror, back of the arms, stomach, thigh circumference, to see if they were bigger or smaller than a few hours ago. I was binge eating “good” foods to the point of making myself sick, and depriving myself of “bad” foods. I was racked by cravings I would never satisfy. By day I would eat raw vegetables, tuna salads, coleslaw, and beans. (I learned later that raw veg and high fiber are extremely aggravating to an inflamed gut.) I sugar fasted and juice fasted. I villainized high glycemic fruits like bananas and grapes. I remember eating three bowls of low-fat granola and skim milk one night in the darkness of the kitchen, unable to stop. Or the time I had two huge bags of baked potato chips in bed, trying to fill my deep craving for something more filling.

In addition to all these complicated feelings around food, my digestion was completely out of control. Flare ups would send me running to the bathroom 20 times a day, cripple me with bloating and cramps, and prevent me from leaving the house for long, let alone traveling. Feeding myself was a ferment of confusion and shame. I blamed myself, assuming my symptoms were caused by lack of self-control. But no matter how strictly I ate according to my “good” food guidelines, my stomach continued to act up, and my body size continued to repulse and disappoint me.

Many people with eating disorders have it worse than me. I hid my symptoms enough socially that my disordered eating mostly went unnoticed. Although my weight fluctuated in amounts that were excruciating to me, it was never enough for friends or family to intervene. Not being clinically diagnosed wasn’t the most stigmatizing, but it was the most invisible. I had to deal with the stress of hating my body and not knowing how to eat all in relative silence. It was, and remains, very lonely.

Elimination diet recovery

So, anyway, the mayonnaise.

In 2021, I was obsessing over my post-pandemic weight gain. Body dysmorphia was crowding every thought. And my gut was waging all-out mutiny. I was looking frantically for interventions I hadn’t tried, picking up and putting down various diets like low-FODMAP and keto. Then I read about small-intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and remembered drinking gallons of tree bark tea with Dr. M to kill off Candida yeast. Maybe it was more than just one bad guy. Maybe my whole population needed a reset.

I found a nutritionist specializing in gut biome and digestive system repair. We would start with an elimination diet to lower inflammation and determine any allergies. “But,” the practitioner said to me, “don’t lose weight.”

I blinked at her.

“That’s not the goal, in fact that could undermine our progress,” she said. “We’re working on finding digestible, nourishing foods that your body can absorb. This is not about weight loss.”

She listed off high-calorie, low-inflammatory foods to help me increase my caloric intake during the first few weeks: avocados, olive oil, coconut oil, rice, potatoes... But her voice muted and fell away as I tilted backwards. I gripped the edge of the table. I felt a wave of vertigo and nausea. I’d only ever wanted to lose weight. Every thought I’d ever had about my body or food since I was 12 or 13, since I started ballet, since my boobs came in, since I became interested in boys, was about being thinner. The goal had always been loping along behind me, clipping my heels. One could, I’d been taught, always lose a few pounds.

I cleared my throat. “Wait, sorry…”

I had her explain it again. I tried to relax into it, tried to hear her words as medicine, as prescription, as permission.

Over the course of the next six months I shifted my goal, for the first time in my life, to eating foods with calories. With disordered eating and body dysmorphia, there is no single, magical cure. But this approach radicalized me. I started checking on myself from the inside first—whether my digestive tract felt energized, sluggish, crampy, or cozy—instead of from the outside, in the mirror, measuring my belly and bloat.

Still, pouring a whole bottle of oil into the blender was hard.

I knew making all of my own food from scratch would be time consuming and labor intensive. But I didn’t expect to confront so many deep-seated beliefs. I didn’t think I had an eating disorder! I didn’t recognize my relationship to calories and thinness as toxic; I truly thought this was how most women felt. These beliefs had been normalized and reinforced by every media message and beauty standard growing up. Plus, so many women in my life—peers, friends, and adult role models alike—talked about food with the same moral valence. “Oh I’m gonna be bad and have another slice!” “Oh this guacamole is too good, I shouldn’t!” No one had ever challenged my binary thinking until this moment.

As I made my own mayonnaise, ground my own almond butter, and baked my own granola, I had to face their sugar and fat content. This was deeply frightening. It sounds crazy to have visceral fear of a food group, but that’s really how it felt: dread, terror, panic. I had to train myself to look at the monster under the bed and see it as just a pile of clothes. I began to recognize fat and carbs for what they really were—macronutrients—not an enemy or a moral failing. Oil, butter, and sugar make these foods satisfying, satiating, and nourishing, in a way that baked potato chips could never.

Integrating “forbidden foods” slowly and steadily is a therapy modality for eating disorders, but I did not know this at the time and my nutritionist wasn’t doing this intentionally. It happened below my conscious understanding. As I allowed myself to eat and be nourished by foods that used to be off-limits, I felt a new liberty and equanimity. Every huge bowl of rice or entire avocado was slowly teaching me that food could be safe. My body was something to take care of, not fight against. My gut biome needed help, not punishment.

It sounds romantic because I’m romanticizing it. In truth, I had no idea my belief system was transforming—I was just pissed off. I was whiny, frustrated, flipping through pathetic recipe cards from my nutritionist for soy-free fried rice and tomato-free pasta sauce. The light of the world had dimmed. I spent a whole month without coffee or chocolate for chrissakes.

My desperation for flavor during the elimination diet’s austerity pushed me into unexpected terrain. I poured my focus into how to cook meals that tasted good and kept me full, instead of which foods kept me thin. I got really good at cooking, honestly, which was an awesome, if hard-won, side effect. I don’t recommend this method for anyone trying to heal disordered eating. It was risky, in hindsight, to trade one form of restriction and hyperfixation for another. But for me, it scrambled the signal enough to help me rewire.

In the end, this practitioner couldn’t fix me. There is a lot we don’t know about the microbiome, and gut science has a long way to go.

“Studying the microbiome is incredibly challenging,” writes Abhishaike Mahajan, author of Owl Posting. “You’re trying to observe a living, breathing ecosystem that will react to the most minute of perturbations, has an astonishing level of diversity, and can entirely change from day-to-day.” (If you’re curious, you must read Mahajan's full article, which gives a much better analysis of the field and its limitations than I ever could.)

Perhaps this nutritionist was overconfident. Perhaps I was just an impossible case. Unfortunately, I still struggle with IBS flare ups, but a lot has changed. I have a radically different relationship with food and body image. And I have immensely more knowledge, curiosity, and sensitivity about all the trillions of microbes living in my gut.

Me, myself, and my microbiome

The science exploring the gut-brain axis is still new and a bit spooky.

Learning about it has collapsed the mind-body dualism I’ve long held as an anchor. “Me” and “my gut” are not separate entities. My moods, thoughts, even my sense of self, are not confined to the grey matter of the brain. They are co-authored by trillions of microbes and the electric tangle of neurons in my intestines. The hormones and immune responses are animating me without ever forming a conscious thought.

Dr. M was right to recommend “meditating with my gut.” She was urging me to listen to my enteric nervous system, and tune in to the subtle, somatic signals I usually ignore. She understood that the “second brain” ENS operates largely outside of awareness, and that meditation might help me hear what it had to say. I haven’t gained full gut-brain axis enlightenment yet, but I’m working on it.

Even though I’m not cured, I’m optimistic about the field of gut science. Things like fecal microbiota transplants, psychobiotics, and nutritional psychiatry are making incredible strides. Gastroenterology is taking the gut-brain axis seriously, looking at it holistically, and exploring how the microbiome can affect and improve neurological function. Could we treat depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s—and eating disorders—by adjusting the gut biome? The possibility is there, and I’m hopeful.

I’ve done a lot of work to understand there are no “good” and “bad” foods. I believe the same is true for bacteria. Both food and bacteria are neutral. It’s the balance and the context that matters. The trillions of microbes inside me are not alien or toxic. They are an ecosystem. They are me. And that’s a comfort.

I’m powered by a pantheon of experts working toward our collective survival. And when I think of it this way, I feel a lot less stressed.

You’re reading The Ick, Season 4: Disgust—exploring what makes us recoil and why. This time, it’s not just me: I’ve invited a brilliant cast of writers and friends to share their disgusting POVs. Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Help us offset printing costs by subscribing ($0-$250).

Catch up on past seasons of The Ick here: season 1 embarrassment, season 2 the senses, season 3 etiquette.

Subscribe now

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

It’s been a crazy few weeks in dating discourse: an app for shittalking men, Tea, hit #1 in the app store (then got hacked by 4chan), and a viral NYT essay, “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” coined the new term “heterofatalism”. Substacker Magdalene J. Taylor, of Many Such Cases, wrote “gender discourse has made dating a hostile act,” with women approaching dating with such defensiveness and hostility that the goal is “not to form a connection or even have fun, but to avoid the possibility of embarrassment.”

In today’s essay, writer Spenser Trost reflects on her own experiences in a dating pool muddied by gender discourse and unfair expectations. After staying single well into her 20s, and watching all her peers pair off, she asked herself: what if the problem is me?

When I was in college, I took a women’s history class, and on the first day, Fate seated me next to a very charming, very cute boy.

At first, we made coy glances at each other and smiled to ourselves. I peeped at his notes, and cooed inwardly at his page organization. Eventually, we began talking. First about coursework, then about movies and hobbies. We bonded over favorite books and what campus coffee shop had the best playlist.

I found myself making a mental checklist of all the boxes he was ticking. Needless to say, an intense crush was forming.

Until one tragic day he walked into class wearing a fedora. I felt an inward embarrassment I didn’t have the words for (the term “ick” hadn’t quite hit the streets yet). He beamed at me. I cringed. How could I fall for someone who wears a fedora? Wearing a fedora meant there was an 80 percent chance he listened to Jason Mraz. An even worse offense.

I eventually changed seats altogether, never to speak to him again.

In the following years, my ick reflex got worse. So bad, in fact, I stayed single for the next five years. At a certain point I had to ask myself, is the ick holding me back?

When standards become barriers

At age 25, I’d never had a boyfriend. It seemed like every guy I met carried a glaring red flag. Simple things like bad grammar or laughing too much at a movie disgusted me.

With no prospects in sight, I started to convince myself that I was okay with never finding my person. Each year I was single my standards grew harder and harder to satisfy.

I wanted a man who dressed well, but not too well. There had to be an effortlessness to his style. He had to be fit, but not from going to the gym all the time. His physique needed to come from his active lifestyle. He had to make a six figure salary, and have flexibility with his job. But he also needed to do something important and admirable. He couldn’t be more than five years older than me, otherwise he’d want to move too quickly. He needed to love traveling.

My perfect guy was a 6’4”, 28-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon, with his own practice who did two life-saving operations a month and spent his free time surfing, spearfishing, and sailing, preferably at his second house in Costa Rica.

Clearly, I was in my own way.

So, over the next five years, I made an honest attempt to get over these superficial hangups. Now at 30, two and a half boyfriends later, I think I’ve figured it out: I needed to lower my standards.

Prince charming syndrome

I’ve noticed a sort of phenomenon in the early stages of dating, where I compare the person I’m seeing to an absurdly high ideal.

I call this the Prince Charming Standard. Take the 6-6-6 rule for example: it’s the mandate that men be six feet tall, have six pack abs (sometimes interchanged with six-inch penis size), and earn over six figures.

The issue with all these “standards” is that none of them reflect true character.

The 6-6-6 rule has strict superficial standards that are built on important pillars, but dismiss any sort of real character review. The requirements are merely facets of appearance, lifestyle, and ambition (or stability)—which are important, but can be deceptive.

Let’s consider salary. While important, salaries can falsify the entire picture. Some people get six-figure jobs out of college and stay there, unhappy and unchallenged. Many work their way there, earning even healthier salaries later in life. However, many people get laid off. A lot of people are extremely bad with their money! And some will leave their cushy job for a more fulfilling, lower-paying job.

In this fragile inflated economy, I understand the importance. But in this fragile inflated economy, what women should want to know is: how’s their drive? work ethic? ability to figure out tough circumstances?

I realized these character qualities are what really matter, but this rewiring took some time. Here’s how I started to rethink what I was really looking for...

How I lowered my standards

In the beginning, the salary question was imperative for me. But I started to notice that stats-based dating wasn’t yielding any good returns. These questions never revealed anything about my date’s character.

So instead of fishing for income clues, I steered the conversation in other directions: how did he get into his field? did he find his work fulfilling? These questions revealed far more about his values and character than a number ever did.

Then, I started observing the happy and healthy relationships of my peers.

When I looked at my friends’ partners, and back-checked them against my personal ick list, I’d find they’d often exhibited some trait I found unappealing. And yet, these were men I liked and respected. And my perfect angel best friend was beyond happy. If ankle socks or a strong interest in a niche video game was good enough for my perfect angel best friend, why not me too?

Next, was appearance. After a few observational revelations, I stopped the superficial screening process and started to prioritize personality regardless of looks. One of my icks that I stand by is bad sense of humor. I focused on people who understood my sense of humor, no matter their fitness, salary, or height.

It turns out a fitness instructor who dresses like a country club regular can actually be funny and sweet. I went on many dates with a guy who was a couple inches shorter than me, purely because I liked his spirit. He helped me rediscover my sense of adventure and humor.

While none of those relationships lasted, I learned a bit more about my dating preferences—and got help moving a couch into my apartment.

Recently, I started dating a guy who would text me “your cute” and “that was to much fun”. This used to be a big hang up for me. But I decided to look past the grammar because the message was clear and charming. He ended up being one of the most emotionally intelligent men I’d ever dated. He made me feel really good about myself, so much that I never stopped dating him. Cheers to six months!

People change, okay

What I was missing during my years of unsuccessful dating was the acceptance of the humanness of it all.

The fun in dating is meeting people, flaws and all. The more I opened up to people, the more I realized how frivolous some of my standards were.

I think about how much I’ve changed in one short year. Five years ago, I was an entirely different person. I’ve changed nearly every outward part of myself—style, hair, hobbies, salary, social life, education—and thank god. Ya girl is growing.

All this is to stay, the person you end up marrying or settling down with will inevitably be a different person than the one you started dating. So why are we putting so much emphasis on what they’re wearing or how much money they earn? If you’re lucky, the person you end up with will grow and evolve a lot in their lifetime. It’s the beauty and excitement of a good relationship.

Ultimately, our compatibility with someone isn’t rooted in superficial variables, it’s in shared values. Things like humor, openness, and principles should feel like solid commonalities while things like appearance, height, or career are at most a cherry on top. Finding your compatibility in the core of a person means more chances of depth and success along the way, even as you both change.

I often think back to my fedora-wearing college crush. What would have become of our classroom romance had I not disqualified him for a mere sartorial infraction? In hindsight, he may have been my perfect college boyfriend. He was kind, smart, handsome, and he listened to what I had to say. The character markings were all there.

Maybe, just maybe, Prince Charming does wear a fedora.

Spenser Trost is a hedonist living in San Francisco. You can find her working when she’s not surfing, hiking, hanging with friends, cooking, laughing or breathing.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Next up, Joe recounts his catastrophic debut as a playwright, and reflects on the self-loathing that can fuel (or spoil) artistic originality.

I was new to New Orleans, and an absolute moron.

My buddy James and I were spanging under the Margaritaville sign on Decatur Street, flying a cardboard sign that read “Stranded Time Traveler, Need Flux Capacitor.” We both had jobs, but were fascinated by the street economy.

I told him I was thinking of reading tarot in Jackson Square, had even dreamed of making my own cards.

He was excited, encouraged me. He ripped up pieces of a waxy seafood box in the trash and handed me his markers.

I drew arcane, occult-flavored shapes on a few squares of cardboard. On the back, I wrote long-winded psychobabble, each fragment a part of speech. A mystical grimoire of my own imagination.

Three times I spread a couple cards in front of the tourist. They picked up the spooky shape that spoke to them, and on the other side the parts of speech would combine to create some gibberish:
Beyond the multi-headed labyrinth of 10,000 incarnations.
The voyager beyond the mystical half-light summons.
A reminder of the inner glow of the forgotten dusk.

Pretty dumb. Not much to it. But the first guy gave me a handful of change for a “reading” and from then on I was hooked on the attention.

Starry-eyed and over-eager, I would go on to run this mystical shtick into the ground: writing, directing, and starring in an overblown mess of a chaos magick stage play.

In it, I would attempt an ego death via public exorcism—one which I hoped would unlock my deep, unrealized potential as an artist and bring me to spiritual peace.

The Matrix of All Possible Phenomena

After that first night at Margaritaville, I set about reinventing myself as a streetside fortune teller. I sat cross-legged on Frenchmen Street next to an old guitar player who called himself Jack Parsons.

I was a promising academic philosopher before I bailed on grad school and rode down to New Orleans on a school bus. But even with university deep in the bus’s rearview mirror, I retained a love for big, obnoxious words.

I called the act “The Oraculatastic Phantasmagorinator.” I duct-taped a cardboard book together in which I told the origin story of an alternate universe. Its name: “On the Genesis and Continuance of the Mysterioverse.”

The day I got roped into the play, I was drawing the latest version of the Omniresplendent Cardboracle on the back porch of a Bywater bar, recently bought by aging ex-punks from New York. “Trippy Joe,” they called me. They were eager for acts. Would I show this art?

I had an idea: an interactive play. A magical crowd-directed fortune-telling experience.

I was not ready for the hyperfixation of Jane, the bar’s owner. Swiftly she scheduled a sequence of weekends, found the emails of the local press, spec'd out a marketing video. I felt a rising panic, but feared losing face. For all I knew, it was supposed to feel like this: horrifying, like a cartoon anvil hovering over my head. As an artist, it was my duty to press forward.

I was fond of drawing imaginary world maps, riffs on the JRPGs of my childhood. In each of them I’d always plant a spiral artificial island somewhere, remote headquarters of a shadowy, elite organization. I called it the MOAPP, the Matrix of All Possible Phenomena, an interdimensional intelligence agency. In my first few months in town, I made zines for the “MOAPP Field Guide” that I sold to the anarchist library—a kind of psychedelic softboi take on my new life in the seventh ward.

The character I “played” as I divined my cardboard gibberish was Eisman Hegel, a troubled young spy from within the MOAPP’s inner sanctum, on a classified mission in Louisiana.

I had been reading a lot of surrealist woo science—Jarry and pataphysics, Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic—and was searching through it for a cheat code out of my ennui. Though the sigils and tarots and neurolinguistic programming never worked, I didn’t stop trying.

Maybe if I stepped it up, reinventing myself in magical theater, I could finally pull off a successful spell and become who I was meant to be.

The Best Laid Plans of Interdimensional Intelligence Agents

In New Orleans, I found myself poorly equipped for adulthood. I was eking out a half-living as a tutor at an afterschool program and spending everything I earned on bar tabs.

The neighborhood was sketchy—a shootout broke out a few blocks from me while I did backyard yoga, bullets ricocheting off the stop sign. The chic downtown hipsters, on vacation from their trim jobs in California, curled their lips when I entered the party.

Nothing was stable or secure, and I wanted better for myself. Something drastic needed to be done. Something magickal, maybe.

Across the street, a group of clean-cut guys from Minneapolis moved in, other sore thumbs. They were aspiring comics, and I tagged along with them to their open mics. They always bombed.

I found a kindred spirit in Lewis, the worst of them. He was tense and full of self-loathing on stage, but in person he was charming and easy company. I gave him a “fortune reading” in the morning after a bad acid trip and we were fast friends. He would be my creative partner for the play.

We spent a couple of all-nighters fleshing it out. Roughly speaking, the play would be sequenced into three acts:

Act one: Eisman Hegel (me) and his navigator Gavin Treadwell (Lewis) would crash their spaceship en route to the MOAPP HQ, in the watery core of the Saturnal moon Enceladus. As Eisman, I would survive beatings and mockery from the Schizophrenic Space Wolves—essential elements of the psychomagic transformation.

Act two: After surviving the wolves, they’d end up in front of a giant Oracular Owl that, sphinx-like, would dictate a riddle. Stitched together from audience submissions, the riddle would form a long, mystical nonsense poem of the kind I was hawking in the French Quarter.

Act three: I’d face The Abomination in a duel for control of the Impulse Fountain—a crucial missing piece of the spaceship—seize it, and guide the audience back to their homeworlds with their MOAPP memberships.

Dread, panic, and writer’s block hung over the month leading up to the show.

There were details like stage design, actors, a script.
The interactive thing, would that work?
Rehearsals?
Jane had the city alt-weekly interested. Could I meet them?
I had four weeks and a brain I didn’t like living in. The pit in my stomach never left.

Thank God Lewis knew how to paper mache. The MOAPP agents would sail the galaxy in an cybernetic whale, the Beluga Cartesian, a black and gold painted monster that stood eight feet tall. We stayed up all night pasting strips of dough on the cardboard cutout of the whale, the room filled with solo cups stinking with cig butts put out in mache goop.

I received some welcome support: an artist down the street painted our owl on a bedsheet. A more seasoned comic on the circuit volunteered as lead Space Wolf, Murderface.

For each act, I’d chickenscratched a series of xeroxed worksheets with bizarre occult symbols and other flotsam from my late night manias. They had lists of questions, spaces to draw and free associate.

I planned that each attendee would find these worksheets under their seat. Behind the curtain, the cast would compile the responses to use onstage.

Broadly speaking, I was not a fan of the work. The plot was cheesy and on the nose, the questions sentimental. I looked upon the play, wincing, and pressed on, afraid of backing out.

“Dude, this is not good,” Lewis said, laughing nervously and tossing his handouts on the ground as we entered the final week.

I waved away his worries. I thought, What difference does it make, Lewis? There’s no escape. Just close your eyes and floor the gas pedal.

Slaying The Abominable One

On the night of the show, Jane created a custom MOAPP cocktail made of blue curaçao and rum, and I enjoyed bottomless access.

I was drunk before the curtain call, numb enough to charge the psychomagic with real violence. I encouraged Kellie, the actress playing the second Space Wolf, to really smack the hell out of me when we were taken prisoner.

Finally, I took the stage as Eisman Hegel.

Standing in front of a Powerpoint, I detailed the over-wrought concept: the audience would travel to the distant moon, burrow under the surface, and swim to the MOAPP HQ, where they’d be interviewed for membership. I instructed them to fill out several worksheets we’d use for ad-libbing throughout the play.

Hamming up my paralyzing stage fright, I misspoke, I dropped things, I appeared on the verge of tears. It was liberating, trolling and abusing the audience with this discomfort. It was also self-indulgent. Peoples’ asses started shifting in their seats.

The action started to mount. The audience boarded the Beluga Cartesian and that ghastly, eight-foot paper mache monstrosity crashed. The lights went out and the audience heard a piercing, drugged-out howl.

The Schizophrenic Space Wolves descended on the wreckage, prowling up and down the aisles. Murderface tormented the audience between rips out of a giant bag of flour labeled SPACE COKE. White powder flew into multiple rows of the crowd.

As I was tied up and stripped, the wolves read out worksheet entries of the audience’s greatest fears, mocking them, snarling in their faces, and howling at the moon.

I was forced onto my knees center stage, my mouth gagged. Kellie was really getting into it, delivering camera-jiggling, brain-shaking wallops from the heel of her palm to my jaw, followed by a maniacal cackle. I pleaded, cried, screamed.

By the time I was squealing like a pig, a few folks made their escape. Among them was Mac. In my crew of geeks and losers, he was a cool hand. If I wasn’t drunk and a little woozy with CTE, I might’ve panicked seeing him slink toward the exit.

After more abuse, Eisman eventually succumbed to his torture, and I laid unconscious on the ground while Gavin made his way to the Cyclops Owl. The play hovered on the edge of disaster.

At the end of the Owl’s vision, Eisman revived. I was delighted to hear the scattered applause as I got to my feet. As I dusted myself off, we ventured to the center of the planet, where there lived The Abomination—the primal embodiment of my frustrated ego.

Arnold, a colleague from tutoring, played The Abomination. Wearing a second head above his first one—a grotesque paper mache replica with throbbing forehead veins and a furrowed brow—and a leather trench coat, he sat hunched over his typewriter in the planet’s core. The Abomination had stolen the Impulse Fountain, believing it would give him the creative juice he needed to make something notable.

“I am a genius!” The Abomination muttered to himself. “A great genius! I’ve done it again!” He picked up the Impulse Fountain—a yogurt container I’d painted gold—the icon of the enlightenment. It contained more secret confessions from the audience worksheets.

“With this, I finally have what I need to finish my masterpiece!” From his massive cardboard typewriter, he read slips from the Impulse Fountain, ad-libbing them into his masterpiece memoire.

I had entered a flow state. Hiding on the side of the stage, readying my attack on The Abomination, the dread and fear faded.

As Eisman, I steadied my coward’s heart, encouraged by the astroturfed cheering of the audience. I unsheathed a cardboard sword, sticky with spray paint, and chased The Abomination across the stage.

Arnold’s massive second head got caught on a strand of Christmas lights. We stumbled, slapstick, around the patio. Audience laughter rose up. Pantomiming fear, the cardboard sword shook violently in my hands. Then, hovering over him dramatically, I plunged the holy blade into his heart.

As The Abomination writhed and evaporated, I tried to imagine those elements within myself dying too. A more robust applause swelled this time, and a couple cheers. We were all united in the relief that this weird, uncomfortable bondage was releasing.

Each attendee was instructed to reach under their seat, where they found their personalized MOAPP membership card. Lewis placed a single unicorn horn on my head as a crown. Abruptly, it was over.

There were a few surprised faces once we took a bow. A smattering of applause.

“That was… pretty good!” our neighbor said as the audience filtered out.

“Not bad,” another of the comics remarked. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, Joe’s really working some stuff out up there.’”

I was mostly happy that it was over. It wasn’t the masterpiece I hoped for, but I avoided catastrophe. Did the magic work? Would I know if it did?

A few weeks later, at a Bywater bar, I found myself explaining the play’s lore to a skeptical Mac. Burnt out on the ethereal realms, it felt good to be around someone more grounded.

“The Beluga Cartesian, our spaceship, well, that was modeled on the philosopher Descartes and the neocortex.” I took a long slug from my PBR. “A beluga whale’s forehead is protruded, much like ours, or a baby’s. And Descartes’ contribution to philosophy was the cogito, I think therefore I am. And you know, that’s the tiny, fragile ship each of us sort of pilots through the forehead…”

Mac took a long breath, squinting at me. His features softened. “I don’t really do well with the cringe stuff,” he said. “But it sounds like you really know a lot.”

About six months later, after a few more disasters, I quit my job and sailed westward to California, riding shotgun in Mac’s barely running truck with a new Chase Freedom credit card. Driving through Texas we listened to New Orleans legend Dr. John, who also went west and found himself in California. That would be me soon, I told myself.

I was wrong again, wrong as I’d ever been, wrong as I was in whipping up this deranged public exorcism of a stage play.

Looking back, I eked out a good time in spite of myself. The pomp and mysticism, the pretentious exercises, the masturbatory spiritual yearning—it was all unnecessary wrapping. I know now I would’ve been so much happier in my creative life if I aimed lower, wanted it less, and had a little more fun.

But on that all-night drive towards California, I hadn’t learned this yet. I was doubling down. Cleansed by the healing fire of reckless abandon, I just had to close my eyes and floor the gas pedal one more time.

Joe Holmes is a writer, educator, and mushroom farmer. You can find him on Twitter at joetforhire and Bluesky at joetforhire.com.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

This week, author Nina Katz reflects on the experience of teenage dysphoria and the relationships—with family and food—that helped them through the darkest moments in the fitting room…

It’s a Saturday afternoon at my suburban hometown’s Jewish Deli and my family and I have just joined the massive line as it spills out onto the sidewalk. I am in the 6th grade, and I am very hungry.

At one point, my mom reaches out to comb my messy hair with her manicured fingertips. I swat her hand away and cross my arms across my chest, feeling my new training bra digging into my shoulders.

She asks, “Did you try that new brand of deodorant I bought for you yet?”

I glare at her, no response. I stare ahead, forcing distraction from the disgust I feel for my changing body and my mom’s interest in it. I’m really looking forward to making it inside; the Jewish Deli is one of those places where I feel most at home. At times, it feels like a more spiritual and sacred space to me than my synagogue.

When we finally make it inside, my spirits start to lift. I immediately notice a handwritten sign hanging from the register reminding customers to place their orders for Passover. I look at my mom and point to the flier, who nods without glancing in my direction.

My wordless demands have gone from “don’t fucking touch me” to “chopped liver, please.”

We are led to a table in the back of the noisy, packed restaurant, smelling of briny pickles and freshly baked loaves of marble rye. At the ripe age of 11, I am well attuned to the terrain of deli menus. There are plenty of kosher delis in my town. And, as I like to remind people, I live just four hours from New York City (three hours and 45 minutes on a good day), where my family makes frequent pilgrimages for smoked sturgeon at Barney Greengrass or pastrami at Katz’s, the deli with which I share a name.

Anyone with the last name Katz will tell you it’s as common a surname as Smith or Lee, but this hasn’t stopped people from asking me my entire life if I am related to those “deli people.”

My go-to deli order is a plate of latkes. My mom totally knows this, so when she asks me if I know what I’m getting, I’m like “yes.” So far she has not respected the sanctity of the deli.

“Do you have a lot of homework this weekend?”

I give up an inoffensive grunt.

“What about the school dance. Are you planning on going?”

I glare again. Obviously I am not going, and instead will be having a sleepover with my friends where we learn the dances from the recently released High School Musical.

Just in time to cut this conversation short, my latkes arrive, glistening like the sun on a cold day. I slather them with their coveted condiments, sour cream and applesauce, and shovel forkfuls of them behind my rows of braces.

I hope that if I keep taking bites of latkes, my moms poking and prodding—which has recently started to bother me more and more—will be kept at bay. Certainly there is nothing left to do but eat.

Unfortunately, I still have half a plate of fried potato in front of me when my mom asks about Matt.

✸

A week before this latke lunch, Matt, a boy at my school, left a message on my home phone asking me to the movies.

My first reaction was confusion.

Matt was one of the most popular kids in my grade, while I was not. To give you an idea on how we differentiated: Matt played on an elite travel soccer team. I played in a rec league. My team was so casual that we didn’t even have a name, just a color, which was yellow.

Though not an exact replica, I would say that Matt was a Zac Efron type—cute by most standards, and what “cool” looked like on Disney Channel. I was a tomboy with curly black hair that was cut so short a group of girls started calling me “Pubes” at sleepaway camp.

I had a few good friends while Matt seemed to be known and liked by the whole school. I think that could be me, but my parents never let me bring a pack of gum to school. A damning rule that barred me from participating in the juvenile economy through which I could have bought myself more friends.

My second reaction to Matt asking me out was mortification. Because, remember what I said about Katz being a common last name? Yes, the first person to ever ask me out on a date had the same last name as me.

Before Matt Katz left me that voicemail, we had only spoken a few times, always in second period English with Mr. Forster, a teacher that got called a fag by some of the 8th graders for the way he stood, leaned against the blackboard, one hip popped out.

Once, sure that sharing a last name was my way to befriend Matt, I asked him, “Have you been to the deli?”

“Mhm,” grunted Matt, as he flipped through the worn pages of his copy of Twelfth Night. That was the end of that.

But after Matt’s voicemail, I was no longer looking for reasons to talk to him. Sharing a last name with a deli is fine, but not with a date to the movies at Montgomery Mall where we might run into kids from school at the food court. What would they think? That we were cousins dating? It’s not like your average 6th grader knows that’s forbidden by the Talmud.

But even more than my fears of judgment, I simply didn’t like Matt like that, nor did I have any crushes on the boys in my grade. Rather, a part of me wanted to be Matt: I would be still a Katz, but sporty and suave, zipped flatly into an Adidas sport jacket embroidered with his jersey number. During gym class, I envied the sweat glistening in the short hair at the nape of his neck, his face glowing red from sprinting up and down the waxed wooden floor.

I wanted to be him, not date him.

Back in the locker room, I changed in the bathroom stall, afraid to put my own body on display for the other girls who seemed to have no problem standing around in just a sports bra.

✸

Just weeks earlier, I quietly sobbed through my first bra fitting at the Friendship Heights Neiman Marcus. Kids cry when they can’t explain why something feels wrong. Tears streamed down my face while I held my arms out in a T like a cheerleader. The sales clerk, Cynthia, wrapped a measuring tape around my ribcage, my armpits and shoulders, and then my bust.

“Ok! All done,” she said, like a doctor removing the needle. The tape zipped back into its roll.

We actually were not all done: I still had to try on bra after bra. I protested having to open the door to show Cynthia how each one fit. In the end, I always lost. The tears pouring hotter, the fire in my stomach burning brighter, as Cynthia stared at my chest and adjusted the straps.

“Not this one,” she’d say kindly, after most of the bras. “Let’s try something better.” But they all felt bad to me.

Once free from the dressing room, I hid a few departments away while my mom purchased my new bras from Cynthia at the counter. I imagined my mom apologizing to Cynthia on behalf of me, her distressed tween. Perhaps she bought a few pantyhose for herself, just to up Cynthia’s commission.

Cursed with a chest that never seemed to stop growing throughout middle and high school, my fittings with Cynthia became a painful once-a-year-ritual. Eventually I was able to hold back my tears, but they were always there, threatening to spill over as I looked at myself in the three paneled mirror, anxiety fizzing in my stomach, and a plea to leave stuck in the back of my throat.

✸

“So did you ever talk to him?” my mom asks at the deli as we eat our lunch.

I blush and shake my head, continuing to fork bites of latke into my mouth. The same confusing, burning feeling I experienced at the bra fitting flooded back in.

I had spent the whole week avoiding Matt. In English class, I was careful to keep my body turned away from his. At lunch in the cafeteria, I didn’t even tell my gossip-hungry friends about the voicemail. Now, at the deli, my holy place, the last thing I want to do is talk about it with my mom, who despite my best efforts, is trying so hard to understand me.

“Do you have any classes with him?” she asks, as I gnaw on the plastic straw sticking out of my emptied glass of pink lemonade.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” I bark back.

“Nina,” my mom pleads, “we are at the deli.”

✸

These days, Matt works as a project manager for a demolition company in our hometown. And I’m across the country perfectly capable of handing out rejections, but unable to shake a disdain for fitting rooms, where a loathing for my chest is alive and well. So, too, is the envy I felt in middle school toward Matt’s boy body. It’s matured as I’ve aged into a furious jealousy when I learn of another friend fulfilling their flat chest dreams.

I’m happy to report my mom and I are super close now. I still have my moments when she asks me if I’ve had anything to eat. If I miss a call from her, I call her back as soon as I can—unlike Matt, who I never called. His simple suggestion that we go to the movies elicited feelings too complicated for me to decode, some that felt too scary to face until more recently.

My mom and I laugh about Cynthia. She says she doesn’t see her at Neiman’s anymore and half-jokes that I drove her to retire. She still asks questions about who I am dating, but now I give her answers. Sometimes I even bring up my various dating successes, or what happens more frequently, the flops. It’s actually easier when my mom takes me shopping. Not just because she pays, but because she helps me pick out clothes that make me feel like me: button down blouses, loafers, jeans, slacks, seersucker, coveralls, and boxy tees. Maybe we stop for latkes at the deli, though as much as I love the deli, I’m not convinced that Katz’s or anywhere else makes them better than my mother.

As I veer further from the type of Katz she may have envisioned me becoming, I never take for granted that I have a mom who hurls love and acceptance in my direction. It’s starting to rub off on me.

Nina Katz is a writer currently based on unceded Tiwa land in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their debut book of essays, Squelch: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Uncertainty was released by Combos Press in 2024.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

You may have read Jake’s amazing article about growing up with misophonia, and the difficulty with diagnosis. But how’s he coping these days? …

There is a man in my yoga class who burps. He is large, maybe 6’4”, mid-30s, soft. He is always the last one into class, and speaks in a European accent I can’t place.

I had heard him burp a few times before. I found it off-putting, but this is hot yoga, and 90 minutes in a 110° room does unpredictable things to the body. Anyway, after years of working abroad, I am well versed in the cultural relativism of manners, and told myself that burping during exercise might just be slightly more acceptable where he came from.

Then one day he placed his mat down next to mine, and midway into class I realized I had misunderstood the situation. Possibly this was not a cultural difference so much as a medical issue. The burps I’d previously heard—from the other side of the room—had only been the most audible. Now, two feet from him, sweat pooling onto our towels, I understood: the burping never stopped.

I estimate he burped 40 times in a 90 minute class. There was even this peak, a little staccato, where he got in three or four within 30 seconds, the absurd part being that he seemed to willfully choose a different mouth shape for each burp, creating this variety of tones, a do-re-mi of belching.

You can send all of the lovingkindness you want towards a person burping into your ear, and I did. I tried the CBT reframes, too: Maybe he’d just eaten. And had a Mountain Dew. But at one point I got annoyed enough that I turned sharply toward him, and he noticed the movement, our eyes met, and his pupils widened, like he only just then realized everyone else could hear him. A minute later he burped again.

I had lots of time to sit and observe my feelings towards this man, wondering to what extent it made sense for me to feel angry given that I was having a hard time conceiving of a world in which this wasn’t some sort of severe digestive issue. In such a situation, the hard part wasn’t even actually the burp so much as my anticipation of it: the anger and affront at the norm violation, the “is he really going to do that again?”

It’s a feeling I’m familiar with from having misophonia. I have always struggled being in proximity to the noises that people make with their mouths. But lying there, I realized: his burps weren’t actually activating my misophonia. This was garden variety disgust—different from a misophonic trigger.

Which made me then ask: What precisely is the emotional experience of misophonia? And why wasn’t I being bothered by burping?

Wet sounds

Science has been slow to understand misophonia. It took over 20 years for researchers to arrive at a consensus definition of the condition. Formally, it is now described as: “a disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds or their associated stimuli, or cues. These cues, known as ‘triggers,’ are experienced as unpleasant or distressing and tend to evoke strong negative emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses not seen in most other people.”

The definition is intentionally vague so as to be inclusive. Partly that’s because triggers vary widely. Chewing sounds are canonical. In one study, 83% of people who identified as having misophonia reported chewing sounds as their earliest trigger. This sometimes gets further broken down into subcategories: crunching, lip-smacking, teeth-sucking, slurping. Others are more bothered by nasal sounds, or breathing, or throat clearing. (Personally I think it should include the specific sound that’s made when people knock a piece of peppermint against their teeth.) A minority get triggered by tapping or repetitive sounds.

But triggers can be hyper-specific and idiosyncratic. Scroll over to Reddit and read about people who are triggered by flip flops, hard C and K sounds, and southern accents. May they avoid the coastal Carolinas.

The “strong negative emotional” response is more consistent. It is almost always described as either anger or disgust, or some combination thereof. (The consensus definition also includes “irritation” and “rage,” which are of a part.) Many people report panic and anxiety, but this seems to be secondary and evaluative—more about anticipation and whether they’ll be able to handle the situation in public.

I’d always taken the co-occurrence of anger and disgust for granted. I can point to times when I felt both; the anecdote which began a longer piece on misophonia—my dad eating steak—starts with one. But the phenomenology is hard to fully pin down, and at a certain point, the words people use to describe it descend into cliche: driving me insane, etc.

The more I thought about it, though, the stranger it seemed that disgust and anger would co-occur. Both are obviously negatively valenced, but what triggers them, what they make the body do, and the neural circuitry that supports them are quite different.

Most evolutionary typologies of emotions recognize disgust and anger as both universal and distinct. The psychologist Paul Ekman, after showing photographs of facial expressions to various cultures, identified six core emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust.1 Robert Plutchik, another psychologist, thought there were eight. (Plutchik put them into a wheel, arranged by opposites, separated by intensity. Not exactly scientifically validated, but descriptively useful, kind of like the Enneagram.)

I think subjective experience is much more nuanced than emotions on a wheel. Qualia is deeply layered. But microphenomology doesn’t lend itself to data, which is why so much misophonia research focuses on one emotion at a time. And when you ask misophonics to name the primary emotion they feel when they’re triggered, an interesting pattern emerges.

In a 2021 study, researchers took 828 people with misophonia and asked them to listen to different sounds. Some were specifically designed to elicit a wide misophonic response—teeth-sucking, loud chewing, gum smacking. Others were more neutral: yawning, clocks, a mobile phone. After listening to each sound, participants were asked to identify their primary emotional reaction: no feeling, irritation, distress, disgust, anger, panic, or other.

Some sounds predominantly evoked no feeling: yawning, sneezing, footsteps, hiccups. More than half of misophonics reported that yawning, footsteps, and certain letter sounds made them feel nothing at all. Panic and distress were also uncommon, save a few outliers—for some reason the sound of cutlery induced distress in 22% of people?

Looking at the middle column, you can clearly see that anger and irritation were far and away the most common primary reaction to the sounds. This is consistent with nearly all research.

But take a look at disgust. Using >20% of participants who named disgust their primary emotion, here are the most disgust-inducing sounds: teeth sucking (27%), slurping (29%), swallowing (23%), mushy foods (23%), and kissing (21%). For mushy foods specifically, disgust was even the most common response—before irritation (22%), anger (21%), no feeling (17%), and panic (5%). Slurping also induced nearly as much as anger—29% to 34%.

So disgust is almost never the primary response. But sounds that tend to evoke it all have one thing in common: they’re moist.

‘Moist’ as a social contagion

Moist is the pumpkin spice latté of word aversion. Ask a group of millennials what word they hate most and you will inevitably hear the word moist. A famous Facebook group, back when we joined Facebook groups, was called “I HATE the word MOIST!” It was a meme well before anyone talked about memes.

The moist mind virus became contagious enough to merit scientific attention. In 2016, Paul Thibodeau, formerly a psychology professor at Oberlin, attempted to quantify how far it had spread. In a series of five experiments run on Mechanical Turk, some 10-20% of people reported a strong aversion to the word moist. Compared to the non-averse, the moist-averse rated the word a full 25 points higher—around 50 on a scale of 100. To put that into perspective, 25 points was the average difference in the entire sample between “delicious” and “fuck.”

Moist-averse people also appeared to have a higher reactivity than the non-averse to semantically similar words: damp, wet, etc.—and to words related to bodily function: see the delta between the groups at phlegm. But: most people had some aversion to moist. Non-averse people scored it around 25 out of 100, putting the word roughly equidistant between “delicious” and “phlegm.”

The same study asked (other) participants to list the first word that came to mind on hearing the word moist, and almost 30% said something like “ew” or “gross.” Non-averse people just played a game of telephone and listed “wet” or “damp.” Curiously, when you asked people why they had an aversion to the word moist, they explained it had to do with the sound of the word—not its semantic meaning.

What Thibodeau really wanted to know was whether an aversion to the word “moist” could be socially transmitted. So he ran an experiment to induce an aversion to the word. One group watched a video of the world’s sexiest men—which in 2013 included Matt LeBlanc and Ed Sheeran—saying the word moist. This video was not originally designed to elicit an aversive response, but apparently the reaction to it when People put it out was so negative that Thibodeau felt he could use it as a proxy. (Just watch it.) The controls watched a group of actors describing a cake as moist. What happened?

Those who watched the cringey-video subsequently rated their aversion to the word moist twice as high as those who watched the cake.

Not knock-out proof: People took a survey later in the session, so they were obviously primed. But you can see, if you squint, how an aversion might start.

I’ve written, and Scott Alexander has written, about how you can think of misophonia as a trapped prior. Your brain forms a negative association with a specific sound. Each new exposure to the trigger sound gets interpreted through that lens, and the reinforcing loop is difficult to break.

One intermediate conclusion I think you can draw is that the aversion to the word moist that spread through the internet over the past 15 years is only partly mimetic. I think it’s actually a socially transmitted form of misophonia. Well before teenage girls were catching Tourette’s from TikTok, millennials gave each other misophonia for the word moist. (I don’t think most misophonia researchers would refute the idea that misophonia triggers can be considered contagious, even as it hasn’t been well-studied. Jane Gregory, a psychologist and misophonia researcher with the condition, describes how she thinks her husband has developed misophonia by being alert to her triggers.)

In misophonia, the association between trigger and response is typically made in adolescence—on average around age 13. Many misophonics can trace their triggers back to some early negative associations, e.g. you were a sensitive kid frequently scolded at the dinner table, perhaps for chewing with your mouth open. I think it shouldn’t be surprising then that a “moist” aversion could be a learned association that moves through social networks. Disgust (like most emotions) can probably be socially transmitted through mirror neurons, and misophonia can also be thought of as a conditioned response.

But, my hypothesis is that that transmission will be easier for some words than others, specifically words that already have some sort of aversive association. I think it would take a lot more work to condition a disgust response for the word “toast.”

Why we hate ‘wet’

Teeth-sucking, slurping, swallowing, and mushy foods all involve the sound of something wet—saliva, tongues, lips, or a food with high moisture content. And it seems that this, specifically, is the variable that reliably turns the primary emotional response of misophonia into disgust rather than anger.

This makes sense, I suppose. Revulsion to bodily fluids is a human universal. This is one of the more reliable findings in disgust literature. People find wet things grosser to touch. Wet stimuli—especially stimuli resembling “biological consistencies”—evoke more disgust than dry stimuli. One study even found that moisture consistencies between 33-39% evoked the most disgust.

I never noticed this pattern in myself until writing this. The actual experience of a misophonic trigger is complex and layered: an immediate register of annoyance, a bracing sensation through the body, a desire to leave the situation so strong it feels like reflex more than decision, and then the secondary appraisal of guilt. It’s hard to tell when and where disgust factors in.

But as I’ve been paying closer attention, I realize there are several foods that I find reliably discomfiting rather than annoying. One is bananas. I cannot explain this. I’m embarrassed even to say it. The act of eating a banana is barely even audible. But there is something about the extremely subtle squish within someone’s mouth that I find intolerable—and I appear not to be alone in this.

All of this suggests something that I don’t think gets discussed much in the misophonia literature, which is that the misophonia response is actually reliably bi-modal based on the trigger, toggling between anger and disgust depending on whether a sound reads as a norm violation (dry, crunchy) or a contamination risk (wet, mushy). Or, to put it into terms you, dear tpot reader, may better understand: dry foods and anger are kiki, moist foods and disgust are bouba.

Both anger and disgust can be considered as defensive emotions, but the difference is in the way they’re directed. Anger is fundamentally accusatory and confrontational. If someone is inconsiderate, violates a social contract, that needs to be corrected. Disgust is self-protective and inward-facing. It’s your body saying “I need to get away from this.”

Misophonia is learned. But that both disgust and anger can be reliable responses depending on the trigger suggests that the way the brain interprets the violation is more complex than pure conditioning or predictive processing: there’s a deeper, evolutionary component that intervenes. You may hold a prior that a given sound will be unpleasant and distressing, but the brain chooses, at least in some sense, how to feel in response.

This is a little forced, an artifact of choosing to focus on one emotion at a time, and I think it’s clear that most people experience some combination of both disgust and anger at any given time, or for any given person. Interestingly, if you go back to Plutchik’s emotion wheel, and look at what you get when you combine anger + disgust, it is “contempt.” I think that’s possibly a more accurate description of what misophonics feel on a day to day basis—although I suspect this is more semantic than scientific.

But let me also propose another explanation for why there’s at least some divide between anger and disgust: Misophonics are well aware that their condition makes no sense, and many are apologetic about it. It’s one thing to get angry at someone loudly eating kettle chips. But flying into a rage at the sound of yogurt seems like another level of absurd. So in addition to the wet<>disgust pathway, perhaps there’s a more top-down unconscious modulation of the misophonic response—that even for a misophonic it’s above and beyond to get angry at oatmeal.

As for my friend who looked, sounded, and behaved like an extra on Game of Thrones: why didn’t he trigger my misophonia, just my quotidian politeness expectations? Scroll back up to the graph that featured the responses to different sounds, and you’ll see that yawning, sneezing, and hiccups—all relatively involuntary—tended to cause less negative responses. None of these are considered as impolite as burping, but my expectation is that if it was tested, it would fall somewhere in between yawning and loud chewing.

Moreover, my own experience with misophonia has changed significantly over time. The triggers haven’t lessened, but the space between trigger and response feels much larger. Part of this is that I’ve developed what I’d call a meta-awareness of the absurdity of my own predicament, the cosmic joke of whatever karma got me here, such that I’ve learned not to associate the shudder that runs through my body as my own. But I suspect, next time I go back, it might actually be a little worse: misophonia is learned, after all, and maybe I was just in the window of grace in which that association has yet to be neurally cemented.

Perhaps, though, that grace was something else entirely. If you buy Plutchik’s theory, you cannot simultaneously feel two emotions that are arranged opposite from each other. What’s the opposite of disgust and loathing? Acceptance, trust, and admiration. Which, you have to hand it to him: 40 burps is impressive.

Jake Eaton is the managing editor of Asterisk Magazine and author of Anzalogue.

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Now, over to deepfates…

I’m one of those people they call “extremely online”.

I’ve made something of a craft out of going viral. And I think people don’t understand how much our politics and culture are defined by the very 21st century dynamic of virality. In the sense of popularity, sure, but also actual viruses like Covid or emotional contagions.

I wasn’t always an internet person. I used to live in a different hyperconnected bubble, a much smaller one. I spent three years at an off-grid commune deep in the woods. I was there because I wanted to experiment with radical social structures. I definitely got to do that. I weathered several years there, and learned a lot of things in that microcosm that have helped me navigate the internet age.

Let me tell you the story in three plagues.

Body without organs

I was hoboing across the States, playing guitar, when I ran into some friends doing similar shit. They said, "We found this old hippie commune at a ghost town in the mountains and we're going to go live there and take it over. You wanna come?"

Naturally, I said yes, and my friends and I hitchhiked into a thundersnow to get to this incredibly remote place. When we got there, we discovered six other groups of people with the same idea. There were only so many cabins and there were a lot of people, and not everybody liked each other. So we allied into tribes, sorting against each other through a logic of mutual disgust.

The people that brought me were radical feminist primitivist witches, so I was inducted into their cabin—a gender-flipped Wendy and the Lost Boys kind of thing. But it meant I would never get along with the weed-grower flat-brim deadhead faction, or the Marxist pickup truck rifle guys. Instead we allied with the Maoist peanut butter commune refugees.

The hippies who had set the rules decades before had all left, and not written down the things they’d learned in their time, so we had to reinvent lots of things from first principles. But they did leave us with one huge, permanent constraint: the open door policy. The motto of the land was "free land for free people," and that meant we always had a slow trickle of new people showing up. Anyone could try to live there, and be considered a member until proven otherwise.

So we were one social organism, theoretically, trying to take care of each other and build a functioning micro-society a hundred miles from actual civilization. We thought of ourselves as pure, in a way. We had isolated ourselves from society. We could no longer be infected by it—so we thought.

Staphylococcus aureus

The first summer we all got staph.

Someone had arrived with infected wounds, their immune system not strong enough to fight off these flesh-eating bacteria. This isn’t a hippie thing, staphylococcus aureus lives everywhere, on any surface, even in the city. But maybe they brought in some specialized medically-resistant variety. The rest of us were mostly healthy, but not particularly clean. We shared one communal shower, and one communal towel. It quickly spread to us all.

It was summer. We all had mosquito bites and little scratches. That's how it is when you live in the woods. But now they didn’t heal. Instead, the bacteria was fizzing away in there, eating the edge of the wound outward, making it soft.

I started to feel kind of sick one day, and looked hard at one of my scabs. It looked sort of wet and puckered, like skin after a long bath. The next day all my little wounds looked like this. A few days later, it was worse. From a scrape on my shin I could see this angry red line of inflammation crawling up my leg—my blood had started to get infected—the evil was climbing toward my heart.

We had a well-stocked “medicine room” but only a few jars of old expired antibiotics. Those went to the worst cases. The rest of us tried healing it with herbs. I remember spending three hundred-fucking-degree days just hanging in a hammock, sweating and hallucinating from massive amounts of garlic and goldenseal and top-grade California hashish.

One guy actually had to have his lymph nodes removed—they liquefied in his armpits. He survived only because we took him to a hospital in the city, and they were legally required to treat indigents with no health insurance or money.

The worst part though, was the way it infected my mind. I felt like it was turning me evil. Oozing from many wounds, shambling around in the heat, surrounded by buzzing flies. I remember standing in the dinner line and wanting to eat my fellow comrades. Thinking about gnawing on their succulent flesh. Mouth watering at the image of a sizzling human drumstick. Suddenly thinking how very far away we were from society and its taboos.

After those three days in the hammock, I made it through. Ask me sometime, I’ll show you the scars. But I’ve never told anyone about the flesh-eating thoughts.

Giardia lamblia

Another year we couldn’t stop shitting ourselves, and didn’t know why.

We couldn’t find the culprit for weeks. We checked the drinking water filter and the hand soap, we cleaned the building, we made the primitivists move their roadkill tanning farther from the kitchen. But it wasn't enough. We kept getting sick. We learned later it was giardia.

Giardia is like a little tiny sucker fish in your stomach—not really a fish, it's a microorganism, but it latches its mouth onto your intestinal wall and sits there absorbing all the sugars and nutrients you would otherwise eat, and outputs the results of its metabolism. That means that it’s eating your food and shitting in your guts. They produce a lot of gas too, which has to come out somewhere, so all day long you’re burping out their farts.

No matter how much we washed our hands or cleaned our dishes, everyone kept getting sick. Sometimes we would recover for a minute and make a big decadent carrot cake to celebrate. Then we would all get sick again, shitting everywhere, spreading more of these critters back into our communal body. We learned later it’s the sugar that helps them multiply. Ass to hand to mouth to guts to ass, that’s the life cycle of giardia. And they were thriving.

Every night I'd wake up knowing I was about to peanut butter my long johns and have to run through the woods, knees akimbo, trying to make it to the outhouse in time. One time I saw ghosts in the field but I couldn't take time to stop and talk to them. They shouted and waved me over. There's nothing I'd want more than to ask some ghosts what they're looking at in an open field under the full moon. Were they real? Was I delirious from a complete lack of ability to absorb nutrients? Either way I missed my chance.

Finally somebody walked the ditch for the first time in a while, to clear leaves and debris. We rinsed our dishes with the water from this ditch. And lo and behold, in the ditch far upstream, was what used to be a bird. A Stellar's jay, melted by time. It had degraded and poured its mortal flesh into our water supply along with all the bacteria that grew upon it.

This was the life support system! The very technology that is supposed to enforce hygiene, transformed into a vector for contagion.

When we finally recovered we had all lost many inches on our belts. And I never fully trusted the dishes again.

Becoming-scabies, becoming-wolf

Then, the scabies.

An image I will never forget. My friend came to me in the garden. Summertime, we were working. He said, "I need to talk to you about something." He unbuckled his overalls over his bare chest and dropped them to reveal…his balls, all scratched up and swollen like a pound of ground beef. I said something supportive like "Oh God!" and jumped away. He said, "Yeah, I don't know, man. It's so itchy."

By now, I’d had my share of itches. After the plagues of staph and giardia, I knew we were one communal body. I said, "All right, let's figure it out. Does it itch in the daytime or at night? When it's warm, when it's cold?" We shortly determined this had all the patterns of scabies.

Scabies is a mite, like a microscopic eight-legged crab thing. You get it from other people, or clothes or surfaces those people sat on, and then they live inside your skin and burrow around like some kind of Mars colony. They make these telltale tunnels from one spot to another, and you can see and feel them living inside you, digging around.

Only this didn’t have the telltale trails. Just spots. “That’s why I let it get so bad,” he said, “because I thought it can’t be scabies. Right?”

And as we looked at his balls, looked at his other body parts, I thought it's gotta be scabies. I just knew it. This made me start to worry about the bumps on my hand. The itchy bumps, which I had been thinking were mosquito bites or poison oak—well, they sure do look a lot like scabies without trails.

So immediately upon becoming aware of it, I was infected too. I didn't even touch him, but just the knowledge of this infection jumped from him to me and now this was my problem too.

And because I had scabies on my hands and my buddy had scabies in a much more sensitive place, I was now the person to announce to the commune that we had a scabies problem. The immediate response: "Maybe you do, but not me."

So then I was the infectious one, a scapegoat for the community. I said, ok fine, maybe it’s my fault that everyone got it, everyone can be mad at me if they want, we just need to admit it so we can start making it better. One by one, people admitted they’re itchy too, until it was obvious that we all had scabies. Because clothes and couches and towels, we shared all those too. So we all had to deal with it together, as one communal body, a body infected with mites.

Well, how do you get rid of such a thing? You can’t do it with herbs. This required modern science.

We went down to the city and asked a doctor. The prescription was expensive for this chemical, permethrin, a pesticide extracted from a chrysanthemum. But you can get a very similar dilution of permethrin in a much larger bottle for much cheaper at your local drugstore. It's called flea dip for dogs.

So then we were staying at a friend-of-a-friend’s trailer at the edge of town, having to flea dip ourselves two by two in the tiny bathroom in the heat. Covering ourselves in a chemical made by a flower labeled “for dog use only,” we started barking and yipping at each other, howling at the absurdity of this crowd soaked in flea dip in a trailer bathtub. We growled and woofed and snarled, we became werewolves.

Despite the fact that most of us hated each other, we were stuck together in one communal organism. There was no barrier at the edge of any one of our bodies—we were all far too dirty and too cuddly for that to work. The edge of our body was at the edge of our village. The barrier was between us and society, and we were now something outside of it. Infected by the mite and the flower and the wolf. We were transforming, becoming plant, becoming animal, becoming bug, becoming ecosystem, recognizing that we were all one, permeable. The flies and the communal towel and the pit latrines and the heap of dishes to be washed by hand in lukewarm water, they connected us as one body. We were a system of flows.

After we had been through all the werewolf stuff, washed all our communal bedding in the gigantic cyberpunk laundromats of Southern Oregon, we went back to the woods. One day we had a visit from the greater family, the nearby hippies that had once lived there and were still involved with the land.

One of them told us, "I remember the first time we had the scabies with no trails. I think I brought it from Boston in '68. And then I gave it to several of the guys I was sleeping with at the time. Funny to think it's still going around."

If we had thought to recruit more of the social immune system, we could have got this information from deeper parts of the body politic. We would have been more disgusted, sooner, and rejected the parasites before they took hold.

Semi-permeable membrane

Staph, giardia, and scabies in less than three years. Eventually I realized that these plagues were not coincidence. They were an inevitable outcome of the conditions. An organism is only as strong as its boundary layer. A society is much the same.

Our social organism was too open in some ways: the open door policy meant that all types of people could come in. All types of animals, diseases, and ideologies too. Our governance system was by consensus of those present, so as soon as you show up you get a vote. This made the governance completely impossible, as weekend warriors squared off against the people who would actually have to enact whatever decision was made.

We were too closed off as well. So far away in the mountains, with so little connection to the world, we lost immunities to things in the default world. When I returned I was disgusted by advertising, fluorescent lights, saran-wrapped foods, and all the other tissues of our modern technoleviathan. They were repellent to me, viscerally made me sick. I still think this is the correct reaction, but I’ve grown used to it now, and can stomach the grocery store with a smirk.

An organism must have a semi-permeable membrane. The ability to kick things out if they threaten its health, and the ability to intake resources to survive. Disgust is the immune system of the greater social organism. It protects us from contagion. But in a planetary society, we are constantly exposed to new vectors of change. Foreign organisms, environments, ideas; our cultures and societies are fully inflamed around these perceived intruders.

I see this online all the time. I watch as memetic phrases and viral emotions spread through my networks. We attack each other for following the wrong person on social media, for not wearing masks, for being inoculated with RNA, because we are all in constant fear of infection. No two groups can ally without first solving every small difference between them. Even homogenous ideological blocs tear themselves apart with loyalty tests and purity spirals. We are in a great autoimmune spasm of the human species.

If we are all one planetary social organism now, that creature is in pain. Its own organs attack each other, unable to recognize their interconnectedness. We’re constantly putting up boundaries. Boundaries between nations, between computers, between people.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve learned a lot from experimenting with radical social structures, both in the woods and on the internet. At the commune, I thought we could prototype methods of living that were more egalitarian and ecologically balanced, and then export them past the barrier of our village to replicate. Those experiments were mostly failed utopias.

But I learned something important there, something I believe needs to spread and take hold: not all contagion is destructive. The flower feeds the bee and the bee pollinates the flower; neither can exist without the other. We are not separate species who must fear infection by the other. We are a system of flows.

deepfates is an writer and AI researcher. You can find him on the internet.

Further reading

A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Now, over to etirabys:

Last year, I ran a Twitter Space titled "I interview people (you, maybe) about the ick". I defined the ick as:

A sudden drop in regard or attraction based on something seemingly trivial the other person did. It might happen on a date, in the early stages of a relationship, or when your cute coworker does something at work.

Then I asked:

• What's the first time you can remember getting the ick?

• When did you last get the ick?

• Do you know of a time someone found you icky?

• What's the most memorable tweet you've seen about the ick?

What ick tweets are memorable? (according to various terminally online people, three quarters of them men)

• I got the ick when I saw a guy running into a screen door

• I got the ick at the beach when I saw a man in the ocean getting knocked down by a wave

• ...when he took his wallet out of his pocket and a bunch of coins fell out

• ...because he couldn't find a parking space

• ...because he's trying to change lanes and he can't because the cars won't give him a gap

• ...because he kept rolling his dice off the table during a board game

And what icks did my interviewees actually have?

I interviewed 14 straight(-ish) men, five straight(-ish) women, and one gay guy. About half the men reported ever having gotten the ick. All the women did.

The women's icks centered around shirking work—a man acting helpless about a task that belonged to him, or foisting the task off implicitly by ignoring it. The men who described times they'd given a woman the ick also often listed times when the women (in one case, mistakenly) thought he was unwilling to learn.

Men's icks about women felt more diverse—drinking too much, cruel gossip, poor hygiene, and failure at a really basic cooking task (that the man himself knew how to do).

I came away feeling like the women were describing a tighter, more coherent cluster of experiences than the men were. In the rest of this post I'll mostly talk about the female ick.

Types of ick

Is the ick "real"? Or rather, is the ick worth crystallizing into a concept? I was pretty skeptical about this going into the Twitter Space. My answer depends on the category. Here are the categories into which the icks I read about online and those my interviewees described fall:

1. Raw fitness

   1. Manual dexterity, physical awareness, poor tool use (rolling dice off table, running into screen door)

   2. Cognitive inability (bad at spelling)

2. Distance from a masculine archetype (that no real human being meets?)

   1. Femininity or neoteny (lip balm, sippy yogurt, doggy paddling)

   2. Physical fragility (standing there naked waiting for the shower to get hot, blowing on food to cool it down, can't walk on pebble beaches)

3. Shirking work

I'm not going to discuss number two—my interviewees mostly didn't bring it up and I haven't experienced it, so I don't feel qualified to write about it.

I ended up feeling like number one, especially 1a, is the most interesting and the most “real” category of the ick. It immediately leapt out to me as an obvious, low-level evolutionary module to be installed in the gestating sex of a tool-using species.

I liked the "I got the ick when he ran into a screen door" example. It's a very primitive ick. You could see a bird rejecting someone for that. Same with "he kept rolling his dice off the table". I laughed when I heard those two on the Twitter Space, but they stuck in my head more than anything else people cited that day.

Intellectually, I got why repeatedly rolling dice off a table is unsexy. Tool use isn't just our specialty as a species—we've gone so hard on it that stronger, faster animals with more sensory acuity will eat the fuck out of members who are bad at tool use. The meta in hunter gatherer warfare is the night ambush, because the difference between a human with a weapon and a human caught without one dwarfs the difference between humans of different raw fitness.

Before articulating this, I felt confused and bad about getting the ick when e.g. someone's shoelaces came untied multiple times per walk (indicating first that they were tying them wrong, and second that they lacked the agency to learn a better tie or buy different laces). It seemed like a shallow thing for my attraction to dip so much about.

Shouldn't I care much more about their kindness, intellect, sense of humor, etc?

Sorry, physical reality is still a very demanding place

In the middle of writing this post, my husband's friend visited us. She seemed delighted to see our eight-week-old, so I asked if she wanted to hold the baby.

"No, I'm too scared," she said seriously. "I have a friend who dropped his baby and it was really bad. The baby is paralyzed from the neck down."

"Ah," I said. The conversation moved on. I went to do some chores. Meanwhile, my background mental process was trying to decide how much this anecdote bothered me. It settled on “a lot”. I went back and said abruptly, "How exactly did your friend drop the baby?"

I wanted to know more: Is permanent damage from dropping a baby rare? (Probably, although I've failed to find exact stats.) Because it might have happened in my family, come to think of it. I have an intellectually disabled cousin who caused his family financial stress because of his gambling addiction. I remember hearing he'd been dropped by his father as a child. I apologize if I'm making my newfound maternal neuroticism too salient in this post—it doesn't seem that rational a thing to emphasize—but I really feel differently about the dice tweet now.

Whatever process makes my vag dry up when I watch a potential co-parent fail to keep his dice on the table, I now appreciate that I have it. Not only do I want my children to be good tool-users, I want a partner who shows practically perfect reliability in motor skills they'll perform daily.

The horror of the almost impossible

And yet. Shirking duties were much more central an ick to the women I interviewed than walking into screen doors. But they don't go viral. "I got the ick when he tried to fob off preparing food he wanted to eat" is not a tweet that gets attention. Why?

First, obviously: it's a sentiment everyone has already priced in. Everyone knows laziness is unattractive. And from the straight female side, it's not as cathartic to read and write about. Certainly before I read motor skill ick tweets, I thought my reaction sprang from a mean-spiritedness unique to my bad character. But my dislike of men who shirk work never felt idiosyncratic.

Second: it's threatening to be ruled out for something that is so...not part of who you are. No one identifies as someone who rolls dice off the table or walks into a screen door. People might admit that, yes, they're sometimes the sort of person who tries to get others to make food or take the trash out for them; it's not great, they're trying to improve...but is anyone the sort of person to walk into a screen door? Come on, for chrissakes, it was just the once...wait, you're rejecting me for that? But that has so little to do with, well, me as a person!

Third: compared to shirking icks, motor skill icks are threatening in an unthreatening way.

The thing about shirking work is that it's almost an impossible problem to solve—at least, that's how I feel about the work I shirk. I'd rather have an impossible problem than an almost impossible one.

I'm terrified by the notion that I could be liked by people and get further in life if I put in an absurd amount of effort into changing my habits. I don’t want to contemplate how much additional flourishing is gated behind setting my own task reminders, unloading cargo without being asked, or noticing and aiding overwhelmed hosts of social events—that is, taking the no-shortcuts route to being a reproductively fit member of a social species.

It's much more comfortable to think that being desired and respected is gated behind a dexterity I've never shown in my life.

etirabys is a writer, coder, and painter. Find her on Twitter/X and Tumblr.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Now, over to eurydice:

I grew up hearing that motherhood would be the best thing I’d ever do—from men.

From women, I heard a comfortable familiarity. It’s just what you do.

I was confused often when meeting people, especially in the conservative Mormon community where I grew up, who wanted to convince me that I should—that any healthy, normal girl would—look at motherhood as a haven of soft, clean bed sheets. A refuge of giggling, cherubic infants. A Vaseline-smeared bliss.

The problem was that I had eyes.

I saw mothers who didn’t seem to find parenthood fun, warm, or cozy. It was clearly a demanding job, more demanding in terms of downtime and intensity than the vast majority of paid jobs held by anyone I knew, and more demanding by far than any paid job I intended to take on.

I didn’t have trouble believing that the men who spoke of motherhood in these glowing tones were telling me the truth. I didn’t have trouble believing that when they looked at their wives’ experiences, they saw happiness. They were in no hurry to read into, much less publicize, the not-so-rosy bits. In some cases, the wives considered it an important part of their obligations not to trouble their husbands with any difficulties they experienced.

I could sense some baked in assumptions that it seemed even the speakers weren’t aware of, perhaps especially the men. There was a difficulty in acknowledging or tolerating the idea that anything about motherhood is hard, or at least was hard in a “ugh this sucks I can’t wait for this year to be over” way rather than in a “my suffering is profound and purposeful, like that of Christ and the holy martyrs” way.

And I detected a whiff of anxiety in these conversations. Uncertainty about maternal love is laced into these ideas. Women know that they can love their children, but also get tired and frustrated sometimes.

Men, operating in and on a different plane when it comes to parenthood, are more likely to hear female concerns about motherhood and housekeeping from the perspective of a son of a mother, rather than a fellow parent.

This makes them very invested in pressing the narrative around them into the one most flattering to children: not only are women never frustrated by motherhood or housekeeping in a reasonable, defensible way—that would indicate pathology—they find the greatest joy in raising their children.

This lack of frustration and difficulty is the key way that you know these mothers love their children. Naturally, it’s also how you know that these children are loved and valued.

In this framework, the tie between how mothers feel and the worthiness of their children is woven implausibly tight. What could possibly matter so much about mothers occasionally feeling tired and frustrated with or by their children?

A child feels profound shame and unworthiness when his mother has a bad day, particularly if she manages that poorly. Because of his childish, innocent solipsism, he assumes it is his fault. A grown man may unconsciously bring this framework with him to conversations about how mothers feel and what women need.

To the man who sees as a child, a sad mother either makes her children feel unworthy or actually has unworthy children. Either way, she should not be a mother or she should be a different person.

Pro-Life and Pro-Motherhood

I even see a bit of the above in abortion rhetoric.

Similar to the fatherhood example, pro-life men are more likely to let their perspective of being sons creep in—an existential terror at the idea that women do not find motherhood the best thing that could happen to them, their children the most important thing in their lives no matter what.

Amid the earnest and honest positions of pro-life men, I sense a need to ensure that women think of their children the way that these men believe they were thought of by their mothers: unimpeachable, in her eyes without blemish. Every moment spent away from him tinged by grief, every moment spent with him, no matter how difficult, tedious, or full of poop, a reason for her to keep living. He needs to believe that there was not a single hour of her life as a mother that wasn’t more joyful than it was unpleasant, because that was how much her child was worth to her. Abortion is a hellish, even demonic contrast to an ideal like that.

Who but the most unimaginably evil woman could contemplate abortion when compared to this model of motherhood?

If motherhood is a fairytale where her children are the Chosen Ones, abortion is a cartoonishly evil force. If motherhood is an extremely high stakes part of life, with high highs, low lows, and a lot of elements that can make it easier or harder, abortion may still be considered immoral by reasonable people, but it becomes clearer and less charged to imagine why it’s on the table for others.

Idealism can be a real hindrance to moral calculations.

Liking this rosy idea of motherhood doesn’t make a person broken. I wish we acknowledged it more as a bit of a silly self-indulgent fantasy to protect one’s self-image rather than the reality of a mother-child dyad.

Good Mommy Thought Policing

A lot of male narratives about motherhood boil down to thought policing women for being less than Saint-Theresa-of-Avila-style ecstatic about parenthood, and I don’t think they have any idea that they’re doing this.

There’s been increased discussion in the last ten years of individual citizens thought policing one another—social control rather than government-mediated. This was my experience being told about motherhood for most of my life by men. The men reliably painted a less realistic and more rigidly rosy vision of what it meant to be a mother. It was clear that not only would motherhood mean that my time, body, and energy would become not my own any more, even my own thoughts, including frustrations and struggles and feelings, would be treated as a matter of public approval or disapproval, required to be kept to myself with little to no guarantee of even a sympathetic husband, to say nothing of anyone else.

It is the wives and not the children—not directly, anyhow—left behind by this framework.

I noticed that mothers blessed with spouses who inhabited the “fellow parent” role rather than the “imagined child” role did considerably better. Their spouses were capable of recognizing motherhood as work rather than maternal ecstasy. They were capable of pitching in to help with this work to preserve the well-being of their wives, not just their children.

Mothers with spouses who saw their wives as similar to their own mother were harder on them for unhappiness, personally offended by their dissatisfaction, and angered by requests for differently shared domestic burdens.

Good mommy thoughts form a staggeringly narrow tightrope, narrower by far than the most stringent wokeness speech restrictions. Wokeness was concerned about ~20 vocabulary words and maybe five topics. It’s cumbersome, if it’s not your bag, but plenty of human existence lies outside the realm of cancellable speech. In contrast, good mommy thoughts have essentially one form: “Everything I do and have to do is centered on my children, and all of it is both worth it and wonderful.” All deviations are strictly punishable by social censure.

I see men all over social media who are scandalized by women who acknowledge motherhood wasn’t what they thought it would be. They’re furious that women are saying in public that it’s hard, or that parts of it don’t satisfy them.

Take a representative example of such overreach: an article from the enemy’s girlboss herself, The Grey Lady. With the headline “How Could I Not Love My Baby?” it explores motherhood’s many expectations and how it can fail at the individual level. This was interpreted by many angry men as normalizing not loving your child.

Despite claims that women do more social censure than men do, I would strongly argue that policing mommy thought is a man’s game.

The best of us fail in our reading comprehension when our identity is at stake. And many men have such a strong identity as sons of mothers who loved them too much to have nuanced feelings about this. Thus, they interpret relatively normal discussions about the complex emotions around childbirth as alarming admissions of sociopathy and mental illness.

The women who write these articles know something these men don’t. These women know the darkness of newborn nights: when it feels as though the sun will never rise, they’ll never stop bleeding, the baby will never stop screaming, no matter how many diapers, feedings, and colic holds they try. The “imagined child” man who polices mommy thoughts is not there. He is asleep. This kind of man knows only what it is to be a son.

Eurydice is a writer and social analyst. You can find her on Substack at eurydice lives, and intermittently on Twitter/X.

There will be 10+ authors!

We’re going to PRINT!

Instead of being the only author this season, I’m collaborating with my brilliant writer and artist friends to create a print edition. We’ll be covering dating icks and revulsions, neo-reactionaries and polarization, pet peeves and pathological loathing—and much more. The season will culminate in a print magazine (my dream) and a launch party (+ live reading) in San Francisco later this year.

Make sure you’ve subscribed to get the launch party announcements and article updates. And if you’re able, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription ($7-$250), all proceeds will go toward covering our printing costs.

Who’s who

I’m thrilled to feature these incredible writers and the disgusting stories they have to share. Here’s what you can anticipate in Season 4:

• Eurydice explores the ick of motherhood and thought policing.

• Jake Eaton, editor at Asterisk Magazine and author of Anzalogue, writes about misophonia, extreme disgust triggered by sound.

• etirabys analyses the causes and origins of women’s dating icks.

• Lydia Laurenson of The New Modality and Solar Light reflects on her entanglement with the neo-reactionary movement.

• Nina Katz, author of Bread Apples Milk, and Squelch, writes about nauseating food memories, both physical and emotional.

• Deepfates writes on the politics of contagion.

• Rhys Lindmark, author and artist behind Ada & Locke, creates comics about disgust’s evolutionary origins.

• …plus more surprise guests TBA

In Case You Missed It

If you haven’t been here since the beginning, The Ick has been running for three seasons. Here’s what you missed:

Season 1: Embarrassing Stories

Essays on personal humiliation and life lessons.

Season 2: The Five Senses

How to experience the wonders of sensation with less yuck and more yum. Essays and podcast interviews with experts in somatics, music theory, fine art, qualia and perfumery, and food chemistry.

Season 3: Etiquette

A social survival guide for a post-pandemic world. Exploring where social norms come from and why (if?) etiquette matters today.

Thank you for being here! More very soon.

-Emily

In the 2010s I lived in Montréal and propositioned bands to kiss me.

In part one, I explained that I wrote a column called “Musiciens que Je Veux Frencher,” lovingly called Frencher (hard “r”) by my American editor back home in Austin, Texas.

I was having a blast. My name was on the list six nights a week at Montréal’s seediest hidden venues. I got all access passes for MUTEK, PopMontréal, and JazzFest. I landed exclusive interviews with rising stars like Quebecois rapper Koriass and Grimes-adjacent Majical Cloudz, along with indie darlings like Mac DeMarco, Suuns, and Baths.

At first this sounds cute and funny, but it’s one of my most embarrassing stories. I rarely talk about this time in my life because things ended so badly. Things were becoming increasingly complicated as I wrote the column. But before the internet harassment began, the major complication was catching feelings.

The Heartbreak

In 2012, I fell hard for Roman Rappak, the lead singer of Breton. I’d been quietly fascinated by Breton for a couple years. I ran across their video “15x” on an art blog and loved it. I put their track “The Commission” on all my playlists. When they booked Montréal on their North American tour, I reached out for an interview right away. I was going off script by interviewing a British band instead of a Canadian one. But I knew I could spin it somehow.

The band’s identity was vague. Apart from a sparse website, the only info you could find was a jumble of underground blog interviews and shaky cellphone videos from fans.

When I stumbled into the venue I asked a guy eating a sandwich where to find the band. Roman wiped crumbs off his mouth and stood up. He had bright hazel eyes, red pouty lips, a big toothy smile.

I was starstruck. Oh, wait, Breton is you.

He had an easy, chivalrous manner and a hot British accent. I was unprepared for the interview to start so immediately, but he invited me to join him as he finished his turkey club. I ordered us a round of beers. From there, we couldn’t stop talking. We parted momentarily while he played two sweaty, synth-drenched sets, then reunited backstage. My photographer had bailed, so there was no hope for a photo. I just wanted to spend time with him. We sat together in the venue’s basement, laughing effortlessly. I dropped the auspices of an interview. We told each other our life stories. I was smitten.

At the end of the night, I hesitated as he held open the door of his cab. Instead of climbing in, I kissed him—a soft, lingering, yearning kiss—and turned away. I went home kicking myself that I never told him the concept of the article.

I wrestled all week before the deadline. Should I write the article? Should I call it off? Would Roman feel deceived if he learned I’d intended to kiss him all along? I wrote it anyway, trying to portray my piercing moral turmoil.

After the article published, I never heard a word from him. I assumed he never read it, and that he’d forgotten I ever existed.

A year later, long after my column had stopped running, his band returned to Montréal. I went early to the show, and found Roman at the merch table. I asked, “Do you remember me?” He answered with a pained smirk, “Of course I do. You broke my heart.”

The heartbreak was, ultimately, what burned me out. I’m not sure how many musicians’ hearts I broke (allow me to flatter myself), but it’s clear that my own heart was breaking all the time. Every night I was setting myself up for rejection. There was romance and thrill in the assignment—but also longing.

I was living in Montréal as a broke expat. The city, the freelance writing, the music scene were so novel and exciting that I didn’t recognize my loneliness. These fleeting bursts of romance in music venue basements were my refuge. I had a lot in common with these hard-working musicians. They were broke too. Exhausted. Making art for art’s sake. In love with the craft, but not sure if it would ever pay off or reach a wider audience.

I asked questions like, “Are your parents proud of you?” as I wondered the same thing about myself, writing for a tiny art mag and publishing pictures of me snogging strangers. I’m very sure my parents didn’t send my clips to their church friends.

The VICE Article

When I set aside the Frencher column in pursuit of stable income and a long-term boyfriend, I wouldn’t say things got better, but at least I got more sleep. To commemorate the end of an era, I pitched a recap article to VICE.

In 2014, VICE had more than ten verticals. The homepage ran headlines like “My Life as a Ski Resort Chalet Bitch,” “Does Cocaine Make You Smarter?” and “The Sex Toy Holiday Gift Guide”. I knew my cunty lil column would be a shoo in.

They said yes, and the article went live on November 6, 2014 under the headline “I Tried To French Kiss All the Biggest Artists in Canada”.

Honestly, it wasn’t that good. I buried the lead. I rambled then rushed. You can still read it here. But the headline was baity enough to open a firehose of Twitter hate.

I was called a slut and a whore. I was told I was making it harder for women journalists to be taken seriously. I was hailed as a disgrace to the profession. I was written off as a stupid girl with a stupid prank.

It was horrible and humiliating. It caused me to question myself as a writer and a feminist. I felt deeply ashamed, and blamed myself for inviting the abuse. I don’t tell most people about this column for fear they will judge me as debauched, unprofessional.

Over the past nine years, I’ve thought a lot about their criticism. In a patriarchal world where women are only as valuable as they are sexually desirable, was it wrong to use that power to my advantage? By doing so, was I endorsing the objectification of women, and the patriarchy as a whole?

These days, I just wanna say: girl, calm down. Let’s take a breath and examine our internalized Madonna/Whore Complex and scarcity mindset. Instead of reacting from jealousy, fear, or shame, we’ve got to have a systems-level theory of change. Was I the problem, really? A kid, desperate for a byline, grasping for a headline that would get clicks. Or was it the all-male VICE editorial staff that would only give women headlines like “My Life as a Ski Resort Chalet Bitch”?

I’m not excusing my behavior. It’s true that I was exploiting my youth and beauty. I was wielding my sexual power in a male dominated field. And that feels weird and wrong these days. But did the women journalists calling me a slut on Twitter think they were going to change the system by shaming me? I don’t believe my VICE article moved the needle that much. But perhaps that’s easy to rationalize in hindsight.

The Heartbreak

The night Roman told me “you broke my heart,” I took him back to my place after the show. We sat on my porch, drunk and nervous to be reliving this old storyline. He admitted he’d read the article when it was published, then re-read it a year later on his return to Montréal, wondering if he would see me again. He told me he was angry, he felt betrayed. “I thought you really liked me,” he said. “I thought it was real.”

“It was real,” I pleaded.

But was it?

Had I tricked him? tricked myself? Gotten swept up in the fantasy and forgotten the conceit—the deceit—of the article itself?

After nearly a decade of reflection, I can answer this confidently: No.

No one was tricked. No one was deceived. Those feelings were wild and real. Journalism is rarely objective. And love and art and heartbreak are all intertwined.

For an assignment that kept me out all night in crowds of people, I had been struggling to make friends. The indie music scene was tight knit, elitist, painfully hip, and I was always alone. I chose crowded shows where I could be pressed between bodies, jumping and dancing with a group of peers, lit up in a frenzy of togetherness. Live music provided the physical touch and social belonging I was starved for in my life outside the venue.

When I was talking to Roman backstage, we shared the sleep deprivation, high blood alcohol, and yearning for validation that can simulate falling in love. I felt that helpless falling feeling of true understanding, relief. Montréal was already breaking my heart every day; I wanted to fall in love, I was inviting it in. In that interview, when I looked into Roman's twinkling eyes, laughing casually about disappointing our parents, I felt recognized, less alone.

In the VICE article, I wrote my experiment had wild variables and no control. I concluded it “was just bad science”. But these days I’m not so sure.

My methods weren’t orthodox, and my evidence was not empirical. But the experience taught me so much—knowledge that has enriched every part of my life since. The small taste of Twitter fame showed me celebrity is a hollow ambition. Living out the artist/fan fantasy illustrated how real life is way more interesting than fairy tales. The practice of boldly asking for what I want taught me that facing the fear of rejection results in the richest, most potent life experiences, even when it hurts.

But most of all, I learned that art and music have emotional, chemical powers—and letting yourself fall in love with the art and the artist is never something to be embarrassed about.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe so you don’t miss the season 4 kick off starting in June!

When I tell people I lived in Montréal in the 2010s, I say I was a “music journalist.”

But that’s not the whole truth.

I was a music journalist with a very controversial gimmick.

My column was named Musiciens que Je Veux Frencher (“Musicians I Want to French”). I wrote for Vesper Magazine, a small art and music journal based in Austin, Texas. It was the time of Grimes and Arcade Fire and Tops. Canada’s indie music was hot as hell, and I decided to find out Gonzo-style just how hot. As an American journalist in French-speaking Montréal, I would interview indie bands and proposition them to French kiss me.

You see the pun ok.

On its face, this story sounds like a flex. Wait, you made out with hot musicians? Professionally?? But what seemed like a harmless schtick led to a lot of rejection, mortifying crushes, and—ultimately—a VICE feature that erupted in a slut shaming shit storm. I rarely tell this story, but it’s been nearly ten years. Time to process these old humiliated feelings.

The Concept

I was 25 with an invincibility complex. I styled myself as Thompson-esque, taking vodka shots with the band, building rapport, experiencing the glamor of indie sleaze from behind the velvet rope. No, I wasn’t objective (as if journalism ever is), I was embedded.

I didn’t have a music theory degree. I’d never played an instrument. I couldn’t talk about the back beat or syncopation. I wasn’t writing for Pitchfork for chrissakes. I wanted the coverage to feel gritty, real. My job was to describe the somatics—how the bass pulsed as a heart beat, how the crowd writhed and convulsed—and put readers in the show, moshing and raving beside me.

My column asked: Is the lusty euphoria of live music just collective effervescence? Or is it sexual attraction?

Certainly you’ve felt that cocktail of endorphins, cortisol, and tequila in your bloodstream. The thrill of sweat slipping down the nape of your neck, eye contact with the lead singer, stage lights with tracers. You notice the artist’s lips on the mic, hands on the neck of the bass, drum stick twirling between fingers. Is that love drunk infatuation real? If you could actually french the band right then, would sparks fly?

I conducted the interviews professionally, sinking into the sagging couches of basement green rooms. These were at indie venues like the Divan Orange or Casa del Popolo. Venues pressed between high-rise buildings, accessed through side entrances or squatted storefronts. It was late at night, we were drinking Pabst or whiskey from the handle, stepping over taped wires, trying to find a quiet corner among the discarded furniture and naked bulbs.

I asked probing questions, inquired about their childhood, held deep eye contact, listened intently. I made them laugh. I put them at ease.

Then, as we wrapped up, I would call in my photographer and admit with a smirk, “There’s one part of the interview I haven’t told you about…” The musician would blink, looking between me and the cameraman. I’d say, “Can I kiss you?”

All in all, it was pretty innocent. It was consensual. It was cute. A kiss on camera, and we’re done. I didn’t sleep with anybody (well…not entirely true, more on that later), and because I didn’t disclose the intent to french until the very end, I wasn’t using the makeout as leverage.

And let me be clear, many musicians said no. They had girlfriends and boyfriends, and sometimes their partners were in the audience.

Mac DeMarco chain-smoked on the curb during our interview while his girlfriend hovered nervously on my periphery. Some shied away from the camera. They may have given me a lil smooch, but not if there was evidence. The Growlers’ lead singer seemed very interested until the camera arrived, then shook his head sheepishly and said, “Nah, I gotta girl back home, couldn’t do that to her.”

However, I also got some enthusiastic yeses. Rich Aucoin, Violette Pi, Dry the River, Juveniles. Ugh, this sounds like an old groupie’s body count.

A kiss seems harmless, right? But during my investigations, things got complicated.

The Complications

I interviewed Devon Welsh of Majical Cloudz in March, 2013. We sat in the back of the deserted bar of Le Belmont before the show. He was gorgeous and intense. He told me about growing up as the shy son of Twin Peaks actor Ken Welsh. He avoided the spotlight for most of his life, fearful he couldn’t live up to his father’s big name. It was snowing outside the window, dramatic shadows moved over us as cars passed on Boulevard Saint Laurent. Devon looked broodily into the nightscape.

“You just have to be so vulnerable on stage…isn’t that scary?” I asked. I was two beers deep, feeling bolder.

He said, “There’s a lot of power in vulnerability. You can’t be afraid of it.”

“But don’t you need some kind of trust first…in order to offer that to an audience?” I put my elbows on the table, leaned toward him.

He turned his deep-set eyes on me, “Yeah, trust. Trust in yourself…You just have to commit, that’s crucial.”

Was that an invitation? A challenge? Maybe I should have lunged across the table right then.

Instead, I lost my nerve. His bandmate Matt arrived and hurried Devon away. The show was starting soon, and I was left alone in the empty bar. Here’s how I described the performance in the original article:

Onstage he was a different man. Unlike the introverted persona I met behind the house plant, Devon was confrontational. He danced in thrusting movements. A vein bulged starkly, running the length of his arm from bicep to index finger. He had total control of the stage, pacing around with a simmering energy … It was a sexual intensity that spilled out of his honesty. It was a vulnerability that wasn’t characterized by fragility, but total abandon.

Obviously, I had fallen totally in love with him. Over the course of the performance, I had been drawn closer and closer to the stage. Before his final song his eyes landed on me. He said, “I was talking to someone earlier about vulnerability. So I'm going to sing this one a cappella…because I've never done it, and it’s pretty scary.”

I blushed hard and receded backwards into the crowd. The room hushed. The clear, bright tones of Devon’s voice enveloped us, unaccompanied. Raw and aching, soft then strained, he filled the room.

My faithful photographer Mo wasn’t with me that night. So at the end of the show, I crept backstage alone feeling shaky and unsure of myself. I found Devon and Matt in the wings of the stage, wrapping cords and packing keyboards. It was too bright. I was nervous and squinting. After a few congratulations and quick jokes, I took a big gulp of trust.

Trust in yourself…You just have to commit.

I told him the premise of the article. I babbled about exploring the authenticity of sexual chemistry between audience and musician. Then, in a decelerated cinegraphic moment, I locked eyes with him. My mouth slowed and slacked. I wet my lips. “So, can I kiss you?”

His face broke into a shy smile, teeth gleaming. “Yes.”

In a lapse of judgment I’ll always regret, I asked Matt to take the photo on his iPhone.

When Devon and I stepped away from each other, eyes blinking open, I felt dizzy. Matt looked at his phone and said, “Whoa.” He turned the screen towards us. The photos were spectacular. The chemistry was pornographic. I gave Matt my email address and he promised to send them to me.

And then I left. I was too freaked out by the intensity of the kiss. I’d promised myself not to actually have sex with my interviewees. I wanted a clickbait headline, not a communicable disease. But Devon had looked into my soul! He’d called me out onstage! What we had was real, right? I feared I might break my promise if I attended the afterparty with him. So I went home.

Reader, I never received those photos.

Instead, I received a curt email from Majical Cloudz’s PR agent. She accused me of not disclosing the premise of the article and that my behavior would not be tolerated. Also, by some unfortunate circumstance, Matt’s phone was “acting up” and all the files had been “accidentally deleted”. I heard rumors that Majical Cloudz was not allowed to have private interviews with female journalists for the remainder of the tour. Could that have been true? Was I that dangerous?

In the article I asked myself in conclusion:

Where do I draw the line when my attraction passes from journalistic interest to sincere compatibility? When do I put down the Frencher shtick and allow myself room to be vulnerable in return? How do I know where the attraction really comes from: do I want the person or the persona? But what’s more—does it fucking matter?

This became the central question as I continued to proposition musicians to make out. Where was the line between person and persona? And how far was I willing to push myself to find out?

I had to learn the hard way, through a crushing heartbreak with the lead singer of Breton, and in the end, a VICE article that made me retreat completely. But more on that in part two...

Hello and welcome to the finale episode of The Ick season 3. Part how-to guide, part recap, I’ve collected the best advice from the 12-article season to create the ultimate guide to being a gentleman.

A gentleman is an exceptionally attractive person. They have a social ease, self-assurance, and charismatic kindness that feels effortless and disarming. Everyone and anyone can be a gentleman.

I started this series because we’re experiencing a social skills vacuum. You’ve read about the soft skills crisis and the loneliness epidemic; The Atlantic recently christened us the anti-social century. I believe a lot of this is moral panic, but beneath the sensationalizing, there’s clearly a real problem. Arguments about the cause—video games, smartphones, AI girlfriends, defunding public spaces—are fractured and polarized, but the most likely cause is all of them. We don’t yet know all the costs and benefits of becoming an extremely online, AI-enabled, pandemic-vulnerable global society. And the kids are not alright.

But, honestly, where are we supposed to learn this stuff? Etiquette training is a relic, gatekept by rich elites. Self-help and “social influence theory” books are written by hacks and creeps. And social media influencers are even more fake and toxic. Where are the resources for caring, constructive advice? Manosphere rhetoric, for all its hateful misogyny, is popular in part because it’s instructive and clear. Men with big muscles and small pants explain how to get paid and get laid—and it involves Saratoga water for some reason. Where are the practical, prescriptive resources for everyone else?

After moving to San Francisco a year and half ago, I met too many genius computer programmers with bad table manners and worse handshakes. And I realized many millennials and zoomers simply never learned these skills. The pandemic threw social norms into chaos right as many of us were coming of age. There was a period (years!) where we didn’t shake hands at all—we were elbow tapping for chrissakes. Plus, dating moved entirely online, and the Me Too movement, for all the amazing social progress and protections it initiated, introduced new anxieties about dating, flirtation, and casual sex.

No wonder we’re confused. Concepts like consent and power dynamics are still being worked out in real-time, shaped by ongoing social ferment. Like Grimes tweeted recently, “We have no idea what’s going on. Civilization is new, hardly stress tested.” (Also, “We have no illuminati.”)

Lack of social skills shouldn’t be cast as a moral failing. It’s not anyone’s fault individually. But it’s our collective responsibility to fix it. Rules of conduct aren’t meant to homogenize. Instead, they’re guides to create mutual understanding and ease. When everyone has basic expectations for acting kind and respectful, Emily Post argues, we create the Best Society.

“Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth,” Post wrote in 1922, “but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.”

Don’t be “nice”

A big gripe about kids these days is that we’re rude. We don’t say thank you or excuse me, we flake and ghost instead of politely declining. Whether or not we’re measurably more rude is debatable. But, what’s important is striking a balance. A gentleman is neither rude nor overly nice. Neither a jerk nor a pushover.

Here’s the formula: assertiveness + warmth = kind. Assertiveness allows you to communicate your needs clearly and hold firm boundaries. It’s the antidote to people pleasing. Warmth fosters connection and likeability—the antidote to rudeness. When you have both in healthy proportions, the result is social agency.

Read the full story here:

Pay the check

A gentleman knows how to handle the bill elegantly and without fuss. Regardless of your gender or romantic entanglement, this rule is the gold standard: your invitation, your bill.

When to pay:

• If you invite, you pay. Or, when dating: if you penetrate, you pay. No exceptions:)

When to split:

• If the invitee is significantly wealthier and insists on paying (see rule #8: gently compete for the bill)

• If a clear precedent or understanding exists (e.g. a bachelorette brunch, a large group dinner)

• If your invitation explicitly signals that the other should pay (i.e. “You should take me out for sushi on Friday”)

There are edge cases and nuances, especially when it comes to Venmo. The full discussion is here:

Give great compliments

A gentleman knows how to give compliments freely, not creepily. The difference between compliments and flattery is crucial: compliments are altruistic, given without expectation, while flattery is tactical, meant to manipulate.

Complimenting others authentically signals confidence and emotional intelligence, making you more approachable and likable. By practicing compliments, you enhance your ability to build trust and foster social connections, which will pay off in all areas of your life, from persuasion and upward mobility, to romantic relationships.

Learn the dos and don’ts here:

Harness the technology of makeup and skincare

Attractive people make more money, appear more likeable and trustworthy, and are less likely to be arrested. Makeup and skincare are tools to leverage this social bias. If there is a lever for more beauty privilege, why not use it?

More importantly, taking care of yourself signals self-worth and conscientiousness, which are deep-seated biological cues. In romance, it’s a sign of self-respect and care for your future, qualities that suggest you’ll bring the same thoughtfulness and intention to the partnership.

A gentleman knows the fundamentals of how and why makeup works, and how to wear it (men can wear makeup too, don’t be dumb):

There are so many great resources on why and how to start a skincare routine (especially for men). This one is the GOAT for the boys.

Be an effortless conversationalist

The hallmark of a gentleman is the ability to hold engaging conversation. How are you going to attract the love of your life if you’re hiding in the corner, or worse, blathering loudly without letting them speak? Learning to be a charismatic and charming conversationalist is easy to hack. Here are the highlights:

Know the underlying structure

There are three unspoken questions beneath every interaction:

• Are you listening to me?

• Do you care about me?

• Can I trust you?

When these needs go unmet, conversations fail. When these needs are met, people feel excited and engaged by talking to you.

Practice these 4 essential skills

1. Create "doorknobs”

2. Find their stories

3. Show genuine curiosity

4. Gradual self-disclosure

Read the full article here:

Know your conversation style

To be a great conversationalist, you must also understand two essential dynamics: your style—declarative vs invitational, and ethic—wait vs interrupt. No style or ethic is wrong or right. Your conversational approach is influenced by the cultural norms and values you grew up in. The goal is knowing who you’re compatible with and how to adapt to others.

This was the first article in season 3 and one of the most-read of the series. Don’t miss it:

Shake hands firmly

In the gentlemanly quest to be socially agentic, you must have a warm and assertive handshake. A bad handshake is a red flag and a deal-breaker—it could cost you a career-changing first-impression, or worse, your soulmate. Under no circumstances should you give a limp wrist or crab claw.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to do it confidently:

Don't chew with your mouth open

Seems like an obvious one. But so many people eat like Garfield the Cat. Table manners are a powerful way to show your confidence, charm, and elegance.

Additionally, for those with anthropological curiosity, the history and logic of table manners is fascinating. Examine any rule, and you'll find its basic function is to prevent either contamination or violence. Here’s a comprehensive guide:

Don’t arrive empty-handed

This rule was mentioned in the article linked above, but bears specific mention. If someone invites you to a dinner, birthday, or house party you should bring something. Especially if they say, “Oh no, don’t bring anything!” you should definitely bring something.

Unless you’re dropping in on a close friend or relative, you shouldn’t arrive empty handed. Grab a bottle of wine, a handful of flowers, a bar of chocolate, a mason jar of kombucha, a couple of tallboys—it doesn’t matter how small, it’s the gesture that’s important. A gift acknowledges the host’s hospitality, and offers a token contribution in thanks. If you do this regularly, I promise your charisma score will shoot through the roof.

Do not ghost

A big part of why younger generations are perceived as rude is that we’re increasingly conflict avoidant. Digital interfaces give us anonymity, and it’s atrophying our ability to have mature, direct conversations—like breakups.

Ghosting is spineless behavior. Have some respect for yourself and the person you’re rejecting, and just be direct. A breakup text can be warm and assertive! It’s actually the kindest, most gentlemanly thing to do.

However, ghosting is allowed under limited circumstances. Here are the rules:

Open the door

Chivalry is hot. But in today’s environment, a gentleman must tread carefully. For chivalry to work, no matter your gender, you need the power dynamics of a partner dance: someone leads, the other follows.

How this looks in practice:

• When approaching the door
  The leader should stride slightly ahead, open it confidently, and say, “After you.”

• When exiting a car
  Make eye contact with your passenger and say, “Let me get the door for you,” before walking around to their side.

• If you want to get their coat or pull out their chair
  As you begin the movement ask, “May I get that for you?” This leaves space for them to decline or consent. If they say, “No, really, I got it” you would then graciously back off.

The chivalrous person acts with assertiveness and grace. The action is not about dominance, it’s about care and connection. The full analysis is here:

A huge thank you to everyone who has read, liked, and shared an article this season. I’ve had so much fun exploring the history and evolution of etiquette, and I hope it’s been helpful to you in some small way.

Researching this topic has lit up a sense of urgency in me. I realize that our generations have the opportunity to rewrite social norms that better serve us and the future we’re building. After emerging from a pandemic into a so-called fourth industrial revolution, we’re living in a time of incredible social plasticity. We can dismantle harmful gender stereotypes, redefine professionalism, and make etiquette relevant to our IRL and digital lives.

Nineteenth and 20th century etiquette was used to gatekeep and reinforce class hierarchy. But we’re done with that shit. No more prioritizing performative politeness over kindness, and silence over accountability. I believe we can course correct from rude and antisocial to gracious and gentlemanly. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic, “Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.”

I recognize that new norms are still taking shape, so consider this guide a working draft.

Thank you for reading The Ick Season 3. See the full season here. If you haven’t already, please subscribe so you don’t miss the Season 4 announcements coming soon. Love y’all.

Venmoing your friends for small, exact amounts is broke jerk behavior. Studies find the more precise your payment, the more petty you seem. And according to user surveys, venmoing under $5 is rude. You may think you’re being fair, but you come off as cold and transactional.

In part 1, I argued venmoing small amounts is a cope. We want to offload the guilt we’ve internalized about owing money by paying our friends back right away. But we don’t need performative financial hygiene to prove we’re reliable. In fact, the very opposite is true. We need small debts between friends to build trust.

That said, Venmo isn’t all bad. I believe we can co-opt this trust-corroding technology and use it in ways that incentivize connection over transaction.

So when to use Venmo and when not to? And how to use it in a prosocial way? Here are the new rules and the social science behind why they work.

When NOT TO use Venmo

#1 Do not surprise request

A surprise Venmo charge can kill a friendship. In part one, I mentioned a woman who received a $6 request for a glass of wine she had at a friend’s house, and another who was charged for ingredients after attending a dinner party. The audacity is next level because the consequences are seemingly less costly. But where you save on confrontation, you lose on trust. An unexpected Venmo request feels like a betrayal, because it’s a violation of the social contract. What you thought was a gift of hospitality suddenly has a price tag.

A 2024 Cash App survey of 1,000 users found that 73% of people have had at least one major negative experience due to cost-sharing with friends. We too often use peer-to-peer (p2p) apps to avoid confrontation (see #2), and financial ambiguity breeds resentment. The cure for this is expectation setting. It's simple and non-negotiable. If you expect repayment, say so before you pay.

Some scripts to try:

• Set the expectation: “I’ll grab this—can you Venmo me after?”

• State the amount and ask for opt-in: “Should we get the $30 appetizer platter? That would be $10 each. Does that work for everyone?”

• If it’s your treat, make that clear too: “I got this! Don’t venmo me.”

#2 Do not avoid confrontation

Difficult conversations are fundamental to building and deepening relationships. Friends who can engage in constructive conflict have higher mutual trust and more durable relationships. “Whoever owes you money may have a reason they’re waiting to pay you back,” advises The Cut, “give them a chance to explain before you robo-remind them.”

If you think a friend is ignoring your Venmo request, you must address it directly. This is uncomfortable, yes, but a passive-aggressive Venmo reminder won’t resolve the issue. Text them, call them, or bring it up next time you see them, “Hey, can you get me back for that hotel soon?” Or, more directly, “I really need that money for the hotel by Friday.”

Setting a precedent really matters. The ability to have a direct, honest conversation about money is a sign of maturity and respect. It reinforces the idea that your friendship is more valuable than the debt owed.

#3 Do not venmo small tabs

Small, informal debts play a crucial role in trust building. If you, like me, have a habit of performative venmoing to offset the discomfort of owing people money, it’s worth reconsidering this impulse.

Studies on trust formation show that it’s built incrementally through predictability, reliability, and generosity. Crucially, trust can’t develop unless you have opportunities to exhibit these traits. Routine acts of generosity create low-stakes moments to build trust: one person extends a small favor without immediately tallying and settling the debt.

“This was implicit interpersonal logic in a pre-Venmo age,” writes Luke Winkie in Slate, “now it’s been rendered into a radical act.”

Instead of venmoing for small expenses, try initiating a cycle of reciprocity. Phrases to try:

• “Let me get this round, you grab the next.”

• “It’s my shout.”

• “Let’s make this a regular thing! You can get me next time.”

I recognize that if you venmo small tabs back and forth, the net result might be financially identical to trading shouts. But the psychological effect is very different. Explicitly settling every minor expense frames the interaction as a transaction rather than an act of trust. Less vigilance over small debts signals confidence in the relationship itself.

In Hate Read, “Nicola Dime” (a great pseudonym), argues in favor of splitting the bill evenly rather than itemizing, “We don’t split the bill because we think we all ate the same number of bites of branzino. We split the bill because this meal is an investment in our friendship—a sign of trust that we’ll do this again and again and therefore, over time, everything will even out.” (more on this in #5 below)

When TO use Venmo

#4 Do give Venmo gifts

You can venmo someone for no reason. It’s very fun. Small, thoughtful, and surprising Venmo payments are a real joy—something p2p technology enables that cash never could. A $5 “latte on me” or a “get yourself some bubble gum” message is so much more valuable than the money itself. This is great for long-distance friendships or, in San Francisco, your Berkeley friends.

In Catherine LeClaire’s WIRED article “How to Use Venmo for Good,” a friend sends her $0.25 with a note “get yourself a temporary tattoo”. In response, she embarks on a quest across Brooklyn to find a vending machine with the perfect prize.

“Most of us don’t need the charity. We could buy ourselves the latte or gum,” LeClaire writes. “What we need[…]is for someone else to remind us of the things that make us happy, and gently insist we take the time to experience those things.”

The key here is that a Venmo gift must be a surprise treat for when you can’t be there in person. (If you’re in-person, see #3). In a time before Venmo, you might send a singing telegram or a bouquet of flowers (you can still do this). But a surprise Venmo gives them the choice of when/where/how they redeem the little treat on their own terms.

#5 Do itemize the bill

For many p2p app users, splitting the bill evenly is no longer the norm. The 2024 Cash App survey found that 43% of Gen Z agree that “dividing the dinner bill when one party ordered significantly more items is not ok” and 39% agree calculating exact bills for a restaurant or bar tab is proper.

Plus, restaurants and servers are sick of the hassle. It’s increasingly common to see “no split checks for parties greater than 4” printed explicitly on the menu. This is where Venmo shines. Using p2p apps to split the restaurant bill is this tech’s best use case.

Even so, a few rules apply for bill splitting politely:

• 1 card pays, Venmo immediately.

One person in your party puts down their credit card. Pass the itemized bill around, tally up what you owe, and venmo the cardholder. Trust your friends to do the math discreetly without making a spectacle. Best practice is to send the money to the cardholder before leaving the table (see #6). Want the credit card points? Then you must have the fastest wallet draw when the bill comes.

• Shared plates, shared bill.

Although splitting evenly is no longer the norm, if your friend group loves small plates and shared bottles, an even split is fair. Again, just set the expectation before the bill comes. Something like, “Everything on the menu looks amazing, want to order three entrees and split them?”

• An important exception for generational and wealth divides

Millennials and older generations, who statistically make more money than Gen Z, do not need to be as budget conscious. If the difference is less than $10 between your orders, consider just splitting the bill evenly.

As Dime writes in Hate Read, if your friends are making six-figure salaries, “there is simply no reason to be nickel-and-dime-ing your loved ones in pursuit of saving $9.”

You really should read her whole rant, but this part hits especially hard: “My gripe here is not with people who have legitimate reasons to watch their dining budget, but with people who do not have those issues and yet still insist on making friendship feel so blatantly transactional at the dinner table.”

#6 Do pay promptly

The life cycle of a venmo is 48 hours. In a 2019 survey of 1,000 Venmo users, 72% agreed that the appropriate window of time to send a Venmo request is within 24 hours of the transaction. Once received, users agreed there’s a maximum of 24 hours to send payment.

If you need more time to pay, text the person you owe and tell me when they can expect reimbursement.

Also, pay in real time when possible. In that same survey, 42% of respondents said if one person picks up the check at a group dinner, you should venmo the person covering the bill before leaving the table. The bigger the amount, the more urgently you should pay the person back for your share.

#7 Do round up or down

Do not send exact change. People who venmo exact amounts are perceived as petty—even if they’re just trying to be precise. Researchers found, “petty behavior can undermine relationships even when [the payment] is objectively generous.” This means giving $5.15 can be worse for your relationship than is giving five dollars even. This effect was consistent across cultures and age groups.

Why is pettiness so harmful? The researchers propose that the attention to trivial detail makes the interaction feel too much like a market-price relationship.

“Between retailers and customers, such ongoing cost-benefit analyses are typical: Payment amounts reflect the quality and quantity of work,” they write. “Between friends, in contrast, cost-benefit analyses are uncommon and even inappropriate.”

@taylordonoghueeI get secondhand embarrassment when I see it

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#8 Do gently compete

Competing for the bill is a healthy, happy ritual. The theatrics are important, and they serve a dual purpose:

1. No one assumes entitlement, and everyone signals a willingness to contribute.

2. It allows for a graceful negotiation of hierarchy.

This is especially useful when there is a power differential in salary or seniority level. The gentle competition lets those with greater financial means signal generosity without seeming condescending. If you’re a lowbie at dinner with your C-suite friend, you both know she’s got an expense account. It makes sense for her to pay. But it would be impolite to assume! When the bill comes, everyone should reach for their wallet and initiate the friendly argument of “Let me get it” “No, no, let’s split” “No, no I insist.” After one or two protests from the lowbie, it is then considerate to let the higher status person pay.

If you’re with a friend of equal standing, and you have an established rapport of treating each other, a playful contest is still appropriate. “Let me get this one.” “Oh no, you got the last one!” “Can I venmo you?” “No, don’t worry about it. Get me next time.”

If the friend paying the bill wants to treat you, do not send them a Venmo reimbursement. You may think you’re being kind, but you’re actually refusing their gift. This could be interpreted as a rejection, or worse, a desire on your part to sever the social tie.

The key is not who wins the check battle, but that the battle happens at all. The shared performance is an acknowledgment that the reciprocity cycle is in motion.

Anyway, rules 1-8 are all very important, but here are the two that matter most of all…

#9 If you invite, you pay

When it comes to paying the bill—with or without Venmo, no matter your gender or romantic entanglement—there is really only one rule: your invitation, your bill.

There aren’t many exceptions, but there are a few:

• If the invitee is significantly wealthier and insists on paying

• If a clear precedent or understanding exists

  • e.g. at family dinners your rich uncle always pays; you’re the executive assistant who organizes the lunch meeting, but the CEO is the true host; you’re the maid of honor organizing a bachelorette trip, but bridesmaids understand they will split expenses

• If your invitation explicitly signals that they should pay

  • Saying “Let’s get sushi on Friday” implies you’ll cover it. Saying “You should take me out for sushi on Friday” shifts the expectation.

For those in the dating scene, consider this cruder variation: “If you penetrate, you pay”. Use whichever variant applies best to your life I guess? If you’re curious how this intersects with chivalry and gender roles, I’ve written about that here.

In the 2019 Venmo survey, 63% of users agreed “the person who asks for the date and picks the location is typically the one who should pay the bill (regardless of gender).” Only 30% of respondents thought the bill should be split evenly.

#10 Acknowledge and offer

Second most important rule: if someone else pays, you should offer to venmo them. This is especially important in new relationships where expectations aren’t yet established. The Venmo offer is the new social calibration: it signals awareness of the financial exchange and sets a precedent for future outings.

At a restaurant, if the bill comes and you’ve gotten a more expensive entree or cocktail, acknowledge it and offer to pay the difference or cover the tip. Mary H. K. Choi writes, “Just offer! Admit that you ordered a whole-ass brook trout more than me on the check! It’s all I ask.”

The point isn’t perfect financial parity. It’s about demonstrating awareness and respect, so that generosity feels mutual rather than one-sided.

We’re nearing the finale of Season 3 of The Ick. Stay tuned for the final installment next week!
The social rulebook has been rewritten in our post-pandemic world—and it's left us wondering, “Am I doing this right?” Season 3 of The Ick is creating a modern field guide to social etiquette and decoding the hidden architecture of human connection. Subscribe here. Find season 1: embarrassing stories here, and season 2: the five senses here.

Further reading:

There’s simply no reason to be nickel-and-dime-ing your loved ones in pursuit of saving $9, “Nicola Dime” on Hate Read (2025)

Gen Z Money Manners Report, Cash App (2024)

194 Modern Etiquette Rules for Life After COVID, The Cut (2023)

A guide to Venmo etiquette, PayPal (2019)

Pettiness in Social Exchange, Kim, Zhang, and Norton (2018)

I started out writing an article called How to Split the Bill, but I can’t talk about paying the check without talking about Venmo. And I can’t talk about Venmo without talking about our weird relationship with debt.

Our Venmo behavior is like a limp or a bunion—a compensation pattern we've developed to hobble along as we form new norms. Although Venmo has been around since 2012, and peer-to-peer (p2p) payment technology has existed more broadly since the late 1990s, we’re still adjusting. In just a couple of decades, we’ve gone from cash, to cards, to instant p2p transactions. The etiquette just hasn’t caught up.

In the early years, Venmo set off a moral panic. “Thanks Venmo, We Now All Know How Cheap Our Friends Are” (NYT, 2017), “Venmo Is Turning Our Friends Into Petty Jerks” (Quartz, 2016). But I think that is overblown.

Venmo solves real problems. It’s easier to split utilities with my roommates. It’s simple to divide expenses on my family vacations. It promotes fairness and equality, and reduces petty resentments (although, maybe not, more on that later). But the things that make it efficient also commodify our interactions. Commodification of friendship sounds bad, but it’s actually what we want. We crave legibility and moral relief.

It’s easier to transactionalize our relationships than deal with the moral discomfort of debt.

Moralities of debt

We have a weird relationship with debt. Millennials were thrust into the job market during the Great Recession, carrying huge burdens of student debt, and were ridiculed for living in their parents’ basement. Gen Z is fairing even worse. They carry the highest personal debt (average of $94,101, a majority in credit card liability), and are trying to build their adult lives amidst the sharply rising cost of living. In fact, zoomers pay more for basic expenses like housing and car insurance, double what millennials paid at their age, adjusted for inflation.

Despite these bleak economic realities, both generations have faced relentless criticism: millennials shamed for buying lattes instead of real estate, Gen Z mocked for Shein hauls and lack of work ethic.

In the U.S., debt is framed as a moral failing. Financial stability is a measure of personal character. David Graeber, in Debt: The First 1,000 Years, writes, “Debt and power, sin and redemption, become almost indistinguishable.” According to Graeber, capitalist models transform financial debt into a moral shortcoming, used to justify hierarchy and exploitation.

In his essay The Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato, calls this the “neoliberal condition.”

During the transition from post-WWII strong government (G.I. Bill, Medicare, minimum wage) to neoliberal policies (deregulation, privatization, and reduced government spending), financial responsibility shifted from the state to the individual. By the 1970s, Americans were taking on more personal debt to access housing, education, and healthcare. This neoliberal system, Lazzarato says, creates a cycle of shame and guilt, where we’re always striving to justify our financial choices.

I’m not taking a stance here on whether capitalism and neoliberalism are good or bad (buy me a beer first). I’m interested in discussing their effects. Personally, I feel the moralizing everywhere: in discourse around student loan forgiveness, overconsumption, home ownership, anti- and pronatalism, everything. I don’t have car payments or mortgage debt, but I feel shame for that too. Instead, I’m paying petty debts like old medical bills and credit cards. I see my peer group struggling under this burden, and I see how our struggles are cast as irresponsibility (see: “Gen Z and millennials are ‘doom spending’”).

“These moral dramas start from the assumption that personal debt is ultimately a matter of self-indulgence…redemption must necessarily be a matter of self-denial,” Graeber writes. “What’s being shunted out of sight here is the fact that everyone is now in debt…One must go into debt to achieve a life that goes in any way beyond sheer survival.”

Although debt is an expected part of American life, I feel a deep malaise about it. I rarely talk about it with friends or family. I don’t check in with my brother or best friend on how their principle is shrinking. It’s this silent, shameful burden me and all my peers carry, and we’re looking for ways to relieve the psychological pressure.

The Venmo cope

P2p apps to the rescue. Venmo allows me to neutralize the guilt of owing money by cleaning the slate immediately. In my cycle of anxiety, guilt, and perpetual obligation, I’m trying to acknowledge and compensate for it everywhere. “Oh no, you don’t have to get that!” “How much was that coffee?” “Let me split the Uber with you!”

Keeping a balanced Venmo ledger signals conscientiousness, fairness, and respect. It’s an acknowledgment that I don’t expect friends to carry financial burdens on my behalf. The ledger is clean, and so is my conscience.

By offering a clean slate with every transaction, Venmo eliminates the relational ambiguity of debt. On the one hand, that provides the moral clarity I crave. On the other, it’s robbing me of opportunities to build trust.

What we’re losing

Relationships thrive on small social debts. Uncalculated generosity is an essential building block for trust and durability in friendship. As p2p culture takes over, this dimension of relationships is at risk. But what exactly is at stake?

Anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, writes that social debt serves three key functions: trust-building, risk tolerance, and social cohesion.

Trust-building. When a friend covers lunch or helps me move, they trust that I’ll return the kindness in the future. Over time, these repeated exchanges create confidence and deeper trust between us.

Risk tolerance. Informal debt teaches us to tolerate short-term imbalance. I might pick up a bar tab one night, trusting you will do the same later. The amount fluctuates—sometimes $50, sometimes $10—but the long-term balance isn’t tracked, we trust that it will balance out. This faith initiates our innate reciprocity reflex, a psychological instinct to respond in kind, and strengthens the trust needed to take on bigger risks/debts for each other.

Social cohesion. Mauss writes that gift economies are ongoing cycles of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. These cycles reinforce interdependence and belonging. Mutual obligation—the act of owing and being owed—ties people together.

The feeling of obligation is a tricky one. As a debt-anxious millennial I’m freaked out by obligation; I’m striving always for equality and balance. But gift economies operate differently, using debt and power struggle to create group cohesion. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but if you have an outstanding debt with someone, you’re incentivized to continue that relationship until it’s resolved. That feeling isn’t always amicable, but it’s a part of the fabric that holds a community together.

The cost of conflict avoidance

Gift economies have a lot of social benefits, but there are costs, too. Conflict is a big one. Before p2p payment apps, if you owed me money for the bachelorette weekend, I’d have to call you on it. I don’t want to confront you like a repo man in your driveway. Venmo allows me to sidestep this entirely. Personally, I think this is awesome. I hate conflict. Socially, however, I recognize this is a major loss.

By now, we’ve all had good and bad experiences with Venmo. I love getting $7 from a friend who knows I’m having a bad day, “Get yourself a boba tea, ily.” It turns my whole week around. But then there’s the surprise $2 charge for the basket of fries I split four ways at the bar, or the $10 charge for gas after a friend took me to the airport. This woman received a $6 request for the glass of wine she had at a friend’s house. This friend was charged for ingredients after attending a dinner party. The audacity is next level because the consequences aren’t as costly.

Instead of having direct conversations about money, Venmo is atrophying the social skills we need to manage financial expectations and have constructive confrontations.

After avoiding it for weeks, I recently had to confront a friend about a debt. A Venmo reminder would have felt spineless, so I took a deep breath and said, “Hey, you still owe me for the hotel.” That moment was awkward, but it legitimately strengthened our friendship. She said, “Oh shit, you’re right.” She confided about her current financial precarity, and we renegotiated that she could venmo me once she got paid on Friday. My trust in her was renewed, and she appreciated the honesty and accountability.

If I had sent a Venmo reminder instead, she would have felt attacked, and we would have both stewed in silence, growing resentful.

This sounds judgmental, and I’m sorry. I’m just as guilty of Venmo passive aggression as you. But if we continue outsourcing financial conversations to an app, we risk losing the ability to handle conflict, navigate generosity, and maintain honesty in our relationships.

Friendships as ledgers

Venmo is, at its core, a friendship ledger. Critics worry that it commodifies relationships—especially through the social feed—but tracking debts, both financial and emotional, isn’t new. We already keep mental tabs on generosity: who remembers birthdays, who checks in after a breakup, who always asks for favors but never returns them. These exchanges shape trust and reciprocity.

What is new is the way Venmo makes only the monetary aspects of friendship explicit. The friend who always replies to my tweets or never misses my spin class is racking up social credit—but if I tried to quantify it, that would be destructive and insulting. Friendships are multi-dimensional; acts of care, support, and effort aren’t transactional.

That’s why I don’t think Venmo’s public feed is harmful in the way critics fear. To be honest, I think the public feed is creepy and voyeuristic, but whatever, publicly marking a debt’s repayment gives the gesture gravitas and accountability. The feed may be performative, but it’s just a gamified version of something that has always existed. Plus the legibility of Venmo is a relief—it removes the cognitive load of tracking who owes whom, making it easier to maintain balance without resentment.

The danger of Venmo as a public ledger is that it flattens the many dimensions of friendship into one measurable one. It makes the monetary debts explicit and pushes the intangible ones—emotional support, reliability, showing up—out of sight.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Making new norms

I want to underline one thing. It’s okay if you feel weird about debt. Feeling guilty and judged sucks and it’s fucking unfair. We’ve been conditioned to see financial independence as morally good, and financial dependance as morally bad. The tragic part is that we’re transferring this judgment to our personal relationships. We’re trying to settle the anxiety and shame we feel about a systemic issue by performing financial morality to our friends.

But that’s simply not going to work. As Graeber reminds us, the financial system doesn’t care if you always venmo Ted back for brunch. We can’t allow the convenience of Venmo to train us into transactional vigilance. Not every favor, act of generosity, or moment of social connection must be reconciled.

We need to build more space for uncalculated generosity, to recognize that social debt—the kind that deepens trust, fosters connection, and coheres community—cannot and should not be zeroed out. The instinct to settle everything immediately is not a sign of moral hygiene; it’s a sign that, as Lazarrato writes, we’ve internalized the guilt that belongs to the system, not the individual.

If we use Venmo as a cope, we risk atrophying our muscles for risk tolerance and relational ambiguity. But if we use it in more prosocial ways, we can reclaim its utility for generosity. I believe we can co-opt this trust-corroding technology and use it in ways that incentivize connection over transaction.

Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll lay down new rules of Venmo etiquette—when to use it, when to avoid it, and how to split the bill elegantly no matter the payment method.

You’re reading Season 3 of The Ick. The social rulebook has been rewritten in our post-pandemic world—and it's left us wondering, “Am I doing this right?” Season 3 of The Ick is creating a modern field guide to social etiquette and decoding the hidden architecture of human connection. Subscribe here. Find season 1: embarrassing stories here, and season 2: the five senses here.

Table manners are designed to disguise the fact that you’re eating. Once you understand this paradox, the rest makes sense.

I wrote last week about working in a Michelin-starred restaurant. During my time there, I learned all sorts of weird and arcane table manners. Don’t swirl your wine. Tear the bread rather than cutting it. Fold your napkin with the crease facing you. These details might matter when dining with the Queen, but in most environments literally no one notices or cares. What matters most are the macro questions: Are you clean? Are you kind?

These questions form the foundation of all dining etiquette. Examine any rule, and you'll find its basic function is to prevent contamination (“are you clean?”) and violence (“are you kind?”).

I used to think most table manners were fussy and meaningless, but with a dash of social anthropology, a clear system emerges. When I saw the internal logic in table manners, I became less resistant and more willing to understand their value. Maybe the same will be true for you, stick with me.

The violence of dinner

Historian Margaret Visser writes that table manners are “a system of civilized taboos” that reduce tension and protect us from danger.

There is an inherent tension at the dinner table. You, as an individual, are hungry. But you, as a member of a social group, must share resources to get your needs met. Thus the tools and rituals of the table are designed to distance us from our potentially violent, animalistic state.

First, the danger of contamination. A majority of table etiquette is related to cleanliness taboos. Before there was germ theory, there was netilat yadayim, Jewish ritual hand washing. Roman elites were known to use mappa, personal linen napkins. Keeping clean has been the basic function of social norms since the beginning of human civilization. These days, you can see this influence in rules like: Don’t touch your hair. Don’t double dip. Don’t lick your knife (if you were to cut your tongue, bleeding would be quite unsanitary).

Outside of hygiene, you can find cleanliness themes in rules like keeping your elbows off the table. This prevents you from jostling the table or toppling something over. “Don’t gesticulate with your fork” prevents flinging food onto someone. Asking to pass the salt, rather than reaching for it, ensures you don’t drag your sleeve in the sauce.

Cleanliness of appearance is equally crucial. Don’t chew with your mouth open. No picking your teeth. No dribbling sauce into your beard. No gulping or groaning. No one wants to be reminded that what goes in must eventually come out.

Second, the danger of violence. “At table we are both armed and vulnerable,” Visser writes. “For this is the theme that underlies all table manners: we may be slicing and chewing...attending to the most ‘animal’ of our needs; but we do so with control, order, and regularity.”

Table manners are prescriptive because we need predictability when eating. Unexpected behavior could be seen as antisocial or aggressive. Don’t hold your knife and fork in your fists like weapons. Don’t point your knife at anyone. Don’t grind it against the plate. Utensils—tools for stabbing and spearing—need to be wielded with precision and grace to signal self-control and benevolent intent.

Teeth, too, could be considered a threatening display. Laughing too loudly is frowned upon, Visser writes, for exactly this reason: “Table manners commonly forbid belly-laughs, partly because uproarious mirth is expressed by the baring of teeth.”

With these shared rituals, we elevate the meal from a potentially chaotic, threatening experience to a controlled, harmonious one. Once safety is established, the principle of “is it kind?” can follow. Serve others before helping yourself. Wait until everyone has their food before eating. Bring your hostess a small gift as a token of appreciation. These small acts transform the dinner table into a safe, communal space of mutual care and nourishment.

When to break the rules

Once you understand the first principles of table manners, you can then discern which rules apply to your life or not. I’ve repeated this phrase many times during this series, but you gotta know the rules before you can break them.

Some table manners are vestigial rituals that can be discarded. “Don’t cut lettuce with a knife,” for example. Early knives were made out of carbon steel, so the knife would transfer the metallic taste to delicate foods like lettuce or fish. To prevent this, lettuce was torn into small pieces during the salad preparation in the kitchen. And only silver-plated “fish knives” were used to filet the trout. It would be silly to adhere to this rule now that we have stainless steel flatware, especially when served a wedge salad.

The table manners that really matter have origins in cleanliness or kindness. It’s okay to let the others go.

Because, fundamentally, table manners are a disguise. They impose order, self-restraint, cleanliness, and generosity over our animal instincts to aggressively tear into the meat or jealously fight over the largest portion. In doing so, etiquette gives us a shared language of cleanliness and care.

When we are safe from the mess and violence of eating, we can actually enjoy the food.

In the spirit of knowing the rules, let’s make them explicit. Here is a list of table manners I’ve collected from authoritative sources as well as my own experience in fine dining.

Some of these will seem like common sense, but many people don’t know the basics. This is likely an incomplete list. Please leave a comment with what I missed!

Hygiene

• Don’t touch your hair too much.

• Don't reapply makeup at the table (including lipstick and lipgloss).

• Wash your hands before sitting down, and/or arrive with clean hands and nails.

• Don’t cough or sneeze without covering your nose and mouth, ideally with a tissue, not your dinner napkin.

Mouth stuff

• Don't chew with your mouth open.

• Don't talk with your mouth full.

• No slurping, gulping, burping, or smacking sounds.

• If you have a beard or mustache, wipe your mouth frequently with your napkin.

• Don't pick your teeth. If you have something stuck, excuse yourself to the restroom.

• Take small bites.

  • This makes it easier to chew with your mouth closed, and easier to participate in conversation (see “don’t talk with your mouth full”) plus, reduces risk of coughing or choking (don’t die at dinner).

• Finish chewing completely before taking a drink.

Clothing and napkin

• Place napkin unfolded in your lap; don't tuck it into your collar or shirt.

• Unbutton your sport coat when seated.

• Keep your tie properly positioned (with a tie bar, or tucked into your shirt) and away from your plate.

• Don’t put your soiled/crumpled napkin on the table while eating, keep it in your lap.

• When leaving the table temporarily, fold napkin loosely and place it beside your plate.

  • Other option: place it on the chair, so long as it’s not covered in food that will transfer.

Utensils and plates

• Two ways to hold your fork and knife:

  • European style: Hold fork in non-dominant hand to stabilize food while cutting with dominant hand. Use knife to push food onto fork tines. Lift the fork to eat with tines facing down.

  • American style: Hold fork in non-dominant hand to stabilize food while cutting with dominant hand. Then, set knife down and switch fork to dominant hand to eat, tines facing up.

• Cut only one piece of food at a time.

  • Cutting a whole steak into many pieces, for example, releases all the juice and makes it cool down faster. Unless you're a parent cutting food for a child, don’t do this.

• Don’t shove the whole utensil in your mouth.

• Don’t drag your teeth along the tines of the fork.

• Don’t eat off the tip or blade of the knife.

• Don’t lick your knife.

• Between bites: Rest knife on the edge of your plate, not on the table or tablecloth.

• Finished eating: Place utensils tidily side-by-side on your plate, never on the table.

  • Some guides say to place them “parallel to each other at 4 o'clock position” but there’s a lot of variations, and it doesn’t matter much.

• Don't gesture with utensils.

• Position your plate at a comfortable distance to avoid spilling on the table in front of you.

• Don't stack dirty plates.

• Wait for everyone to finish before clearing plates.

Respectfulness

• Wait until at least two other people have been served before beginning to eat.

  • In a large group you do not need to wait until everyone is served, it’s rude to the chef to let good food get cold.

• If you arrive first, stand to greet other guests when they arrive.

• Arriving on time:

  • When meeting friends: 10-15 minute grace period (obviously depends on your friendship)

  • When meeting work colleagues: arrive on time

  • When meeting your boss or funder: arrive early

• Serve others before yourself.

  • For a communal carafe of water or shared bottle of wine: top up the other glasses before refilling your own.

  • For shared dishes:

    • Offer to others before serving yourself

    • Pass items to the right

    • Present serving utensils handle-first to the next person

• Don't reach across the table; ask for items to be passed.

• Be kind to your server.

• Tip generously.

• If you’re invited for dinner at someone’s home, don’t arrive empty-handed.

  • Ask the host what you can bring, even if they say “nothing” bring a small gift (bottle of wine, bouquet of flowers).

• Keep your smartphone off the table and set to silent or vibrate.

But wait…what about splitting the bill? Stay tuned for Venmo etiquette, coming soon.

You’re reading Season 3 of The Ick. The social rulebook has been rewritten in our post-pandemic world—and it's left us wondering, “Am I doing this right?” Season 3 of The Ick is creating a modern field guide to social etiquette and decoding the hidden architecture of human connection. Subscribe here. Find season 1: embarrassing stories here, and season 2: the five senses here.

Sources

• Top 10 Must Know Table Manners, Emily Post Institute

• Modern Etiquette, Vogue, 2015

• The New Rules for How to Behave, The Cut, 2023

• The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners, Margaret Visser, 1991

All my early jobs, beginning at Woody’s BBQ, were in restaurants. I’ve seen every variety of table manners. Diplomats who dabbed their mouths. Families whose toddlers crumbled all the crackers. Regulars who called me “toots”.

By the time I was in college, I’d worked my way up to a Michelin-starred Italian place. Fine dining was brutal, honestly. But I endured it because the tips felt like stripper money compared to my peers at the campus phone-a-thon.

Michelin-star service is exacting and punishing. You must perform elaborate wine-uncorking choreography, memorize all recipe ingredients, list all the tobacco notes in Montepulciano. You must stay out of sight, but also anticipate every need. We’ve all seen The Bear so I won’t go on.

During my time at this restaurant, I came to understand how wealth, class, and kindness shape behavior. The regulars were polished, confident, effortless. My family did not have a particularly refined relationship with food, (see my essay from season 2, How to Taste, for my hillbilly history). Never, in my middle-class life, had I eaten at a Michelin-starred establishment. Watching the customers here, I noticed all sorts of new-to-me behaviors: how to gracefully light a cigarette, how to swirl a snifter, how to cleanly carve a Cornish hen. (To be clear, I also saw plenty of tactless, pretentious, and boorish behavior—but I’m focusing here on the good.)

One thing I recognized: no elbows on the table.

This one behavior tended to separate the graceful from the rude. So, what’s with this custom? Where does it come from? What’s the point?

To understand, I had to go back. Back to the origins of how manners came to be defined as self-restraint.

Body politics

At a fundamental level, table manners signal self control.

Historically, regulating your body and emotions demonstrated refinement and discipline. The opposite—moving too freely, letting your limbs relax or sprawl—was considered inconsiderate of others’ personal space, a lack of self mastery.

Similarly, losing emotional composure was highly improper.

Take Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice for example. He confesses his love for Elizabeth Bennet by saying, “I beg you, most fervently, to relieve my suffering and consent to be my wife.” This was, for the time, an explosive and humiliating display of emotion.

In the 1922 edition of Etiquette, Emily Post writes, “In [a gentleman’s] own self-control lies his chief ascendancy over others who impulsively betray every emotion. Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embarrassment, ardor, or hilarity, are all bad form.” In public, and especially at the table, the well-mannered were expected to maintain composure in speech, posture, movement, and expression at all times.

But etiquette hasn’t always been so strict.

Early manners were primarily about hygiene and order. Sociologist Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, cites the mundane and grotesque instructions of early etiquette guides: In the 13th century, Tannhäuser advised not to blow one’s nose on the tablecloth (use your sleeve instead); in On Civility In Boys (1530), Erasmus instructed readers not to lick the dish or urinate in view of others.

Plus, medieval dinner tables weren’t tables at all. They were planks of wood resting on trestles. If you put your elbows or body weight on this surface, you risked upturning the whole banquet.

Also consider, everyone at dinner was armed. In the Middle Ages, before modern cutlery, people ate with their hands and their personal knife—a very sharp, multi-purpose blade or dagger. Keeping tempers in check was critical. This led to the common law “don’t talk politics or money,” a self-control guideline that preserved social harmony, lest you have a Red Wedding situation.

Art of control

By the 17th and 18th centuries, manners evolved into a much stricter form of bodily discipline, reinforcing hierarchical control. King Louis XIV’s court at Versailles turned dining into a form of performance, where every movement—from the depth of a bow to the way you held a fork—was dictated by strict rules.

This power dynamic was an important tool of control for the aristocracy. Elaborate table manners served as in-group signals for high-class spaces, ensuring that anyone unfamiliar would betray their lower status with a graceless error.

Historian Margaret Visser describes this in The Rituals of Dinner: “Take olives with a spoon but never a fork, take walnuts with fingers, serve cheese with a knife, always take milk products with a spoon even if they are firm enough for a fork, use a spoon to eat curry, and know which way to sweep your spoon when eating soup.”

And all of this must be performed effortlessly. Visser writes, “No sign must appear of all the training involved in the production of ‘polish.’ No effort, no hesitation, no clumsiness of movement must intrude.”

Strangely, these elaborate table manners made eating—the primary purpose of the table!—deliberately more challenging. But the performance was the point. The theatre of etiquette made dinner into a ceremony, a celebration. These theatrics elevated the affair above a basic feed. Needing food to survive was humiliating. Such a peasant concern! How embarrassing to acknowledge bodily function!

To seem overly absorbed in food risked appearing hungry or gluttonous. Behaviors that signaled enjoyment—slurping, burping, smacking lips, sighing, or patting one’s belly—indicated vulgar, insufficient control over the appetite.

Post sums up the sentiment like this: “All rules of table manners are made to avoid ugliness; to let any one see what you have in your mouth is repulsive; to make a noise is to suggest an animal; to make a mess is disgusting.”

Also, corsets. Stooping forward was impossible in a corset (which were worn by both men and women). Bending to lean on your hand was uncomfortable and unnatural looking. Thus, bodily discipline was reinforced down to the very foundation of undergarments.

“Stillness of feature corresponded to the immobility required by correct posture. At table, one was to sit bolt upright,” Visser writes. “There was to be no leaning, either to left or to right, and no elbows on the table, for these encroached on the space of others and suggested a lack of total bodily control.”

What began as practical measures to promote hygiene and social harmony, transformed over time into a display of self-discipline and exclusivity.

So, because of all this, the no-elbows rule persists. A person who sprawls, fidgets, or takes up too much space is still seen as undisciplined or even disrespectful. Sitting up straight, elbows in, behaving with emotional composure are markers of control—and by extension, of refinement and status.

And now?

Do we still need this rule, though? Maybe we should scrap it, considering it was created to reinforce classist hierarchy? Plus, we’re no longer under the scrutiny of a monarch or aristocratic elite. Most American dining is pretty casual by comparison. Unless you’re having a Jack in Titanic moment, or supping with the President, you don’t need to know which is the oyster fork and which is the dessert spoon.

So, yes, for most occasions, elbows on the table are allowed. It is better to just be casual in a casual atmosphere. Sitting awkwardly erect in the booth at Chile’s is just uncomfortable. If you're drinking a margarita out of a bowl, you can drop the formalities.

Here’s my take: Before the food arrives and after it’s cleared, elbows are fine. Lean forward, show interest in the conversation, rest your chin pensively in your palm! But when the table is covered in food, elbows crowd the space and risk knocking things over.

Post offers this advice: no elbows while you’re actively eating. Avoid this unattractive scene: “Elbows planted like clothes-line poles and hands waving glasses or forks about in between.” She says eating while propped up on your elbow is reserved for the “ill or convalescent”.

So basically, adapt the rule to your circumstance and lifestyle.

But keep the no-elbows rule for formal occasions! It adds a subtle dash of pomp. Keeping your posture tall and your elbows tucked in is a ritual worthy of black tie weddings, awards ceremonies, affairs of state, or the Met Gala (I can dream). It demonstrates regard for personal space and respect for the gravity and spectacle of the celebration.

During my time in fine dining I served Congressmen, French diplomats, and even Oprah (she tipped $1K, not kidding). I felt like an anthropologist, observing the elaborate rituals of the rich and powerful. While much of it was pantomime and bluster, the truly graceful were marked by simple traits: kindness, respect, and self-control.

The no-elbows rule has survived since the Middle Ages, and it’s durable for a reason. It holds symbolic relevance. In my daily life, where I’m otherwise slouching over my computer or scrolling my phone, sitting up straight, focusing on my companions, and giving the dinner my full attention feels different and special. I think affording the ceremony of a meal this respect and attention is, more than any arbitrary rule, the marker of good manners.

Sources

Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Emily Post, 1922

The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Norbert Elias, 1939

The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners, Margaret Visser, 1991

You’re reading Season 3 of The Ick. The social rulebook has been rewritten in our post-pandemic world—and it's left us wondering, “Am I doing this right?” Season 3 of The Ick is creating a modern field guide to social etiquette and decoding the hidden architecture of human connection. Subscribe here. Find season 1: embarrassing stories here, and season 2: the five senses here.