Welcome back, Men’s Traitors. Happy New Year! For the first time in 2017 we’re kicking off our weekly Menstration, our highly subjective weekly roundup of the BAD and RAD from this week…It’s the Men’s Trait’s Raddest Things of the Week award.
Before I get into the nominees, how about a breakdown of our process? We get hundreds of nominees per week from readers. If you want to nominate someone, there are about 3 ways to reach us:
- You can submit nominees to our Facebook page.
- You can tweet us your nonimations at @MensTraitOnline or @johnpsousa using the hashtag #MTRaddestPersonOftheWeek or #MTDBagOfTheWeek.
- You can email us at “editorial at 301digitalmedia dot com” with “MT D-Bag Of The Week Nominee” or “MT Raddest Things of the Week” in the subject line.
Depending on the nominee, we’ll publish a post, and then we’ll keep track of them all week. Our staff then votes (sometimes after a vigorous Slack debate). So, you can submit items on people/things that were RAD or people/things that are BAD and we will break them down.
Raddest Thing of the Week #1: NFL Playoffs
That’s right Jim, Playoffs! This is bittersweet for me, because I’m a Raiders fan. We haven’t been in the playoffs since we lost Super Bowl XXXVII to the Buccaneers. And here comes this year, we’re 12-4 but I’m miserable, because our best player, Derek Carr, who I may or may not want to leave my family and get an apartment with, broke his leg. I miss his leadership. I miss his musk. Anyway, tomorrow afternoon we play Houston in the Wild Card round, and our starting quarterback is a rookie starting his first ever game. Luckily, the Texans quarterback is Brock Osweiler, AKA Broke Assweiler. Khalil Mack is gonna sack the shit out of him and we might just survive to get run by the Patriots next week. Good times.
Raddest Dog of the Week: Scarface
Originally we’d planned to make his owner, Florida Woman Brenda Guerrero, our first D-bag of the Week of 2017, and she was obviously our first nominee. But we decided to honor Scarface the Pit Bull, the dog upon whom Brenda and her dipshit husband tried to put a stupid sweater. Scarface reacted accordingly and mauled the shit out of them. Good dog, Scarface.
D-bag of the Week Nominee #1: Baynard Woods
Baynard Woods wrote an essay for Vox in their “First Person” section, which, according to the description, is “Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays.” You may recognize “First Person” as the place where you read about the assholes who live like Victorians. Woods fires up his trusty Selectra and wrote a long essay about getting a vasectomy.
You’d think a dude getting a vasectomy wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Hundreds of thousands of men get them every year. And there’s only one reason for a dude to get a vasectomy, and that’s because he doesn’t want any kids. Or any more kids. But either way, the whole point of a vasectomy is to prevent getting someone pregnant.
So obviously, we know why Baynard Woods wanted a vasectomy, he doesn’t want any kids. But Baynard Woods and his wife don’t have any kids yet, and don’t ever want kids. So he got a vasectomy. I’m still trying to figure out why this couldn’t have been communicated via Tweet instead of a 4000 word essay about a hipsters nuts getting snipped.
Let’s take a look at some choice excerpts, shall we?
In the section, “How my wife and I knew we didn’t want to have children,” we get our first clue about what kind of people we are dealing with:
We have family meetings and hash out all the pros and cons and then make a decision and do not waver from it. We used to start the meetings playing instruments and singing “Boil the Cabbage Down” and end them with “I Shall Not Be Moved.”
Sounds awesome.
My wife, who is marked as “President” of the family on the cover of the red notebook, did not like playing music — my first big husbandly mistake was buying her the mandolin that I wanted her to play — and soon nixed the musical ritual.
I wish she was writing this essay. She probably could have explained it in a tweet. Like, “Baynard got a vasectomy because we don’t want kids kthanksbai.”
Neither of us are particularly attached to our own genes. We don’t need to see ourselves or each other reflected in some small face.
Every essay by people who don’t want kids includes some condescending shit like this. Like parents are narcissists who only reproduce to live vicariously through their spawn. Okay, some parents are like that, but most of the time they’re too busy cleaning that small face, or arguing with that small face about which goddam spoon they want to use at dinner to see anything reflected in that face but deep, soul-crushing regret.
We don’t own a car, we rent an apartment in downtown Baltimore (with no interest in owning), and not having a kid seems like another way to reduce our carbon footprint.
If that “Boil the Cabbage Down” shit wasn’t enough to convince you that this was hipster solipsism, then this shit about not having a car and renting should convince you.
He then goes through some boilerplate people trying to convince him he’s wrong and then we get to my favorite part.
To make it worse, I have a deeply pessimistic view of the long-term future. I suspect that within the next couple of generations, some catastrophe will wipe out millions, if not billions, of people. If not my children, then my grandchildren will either be cannibals or be eaten by cannibals.
LOL.
My wife disagreed with me on this point. She believed in the goodness of people and the idea of progress, that there is a moral arc to the universe. Her desire not to have children was not as motivated by fear as mine — at least until after the election of Donald Trump.
Oh God. Now this is turning into my Facebook feed of the last 8 weeks or so, all the people who live in “Blue States” (I love you all!) who see people in flyover country as cannibals. Jesus Christ.
(Another friend, a woman, texted me to say, “I remember u telling me once about not wanting to have kids because our world is gonna be like a Cormac McCarthy book. I agree. And that makes me sad.”)
Texting! Also Cormac McCarthy is unreadable.
The essay then gets into the only really compelling and important point, which is that the burden of birth control falls disproportionately on women, and he wanted to give his wife a break from a lifetime of hormonal birth control. This is good and admirable, and if the essay had been a blog post about this part I would not be spending so much time giving Baynard Woods so much shit.
Anyway you get the point, read it if you like.
D-bag of the Week: Facebook Live Torture Porn
Oh man Wednesday. You may have seen it live or read about it sense, but Jesus Christ was this awful. A group of 4 African Americans kidnapped and tortured a mentally disabled white guy while screaming “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump.”
The four have been charged with hate crimes in addition to kidnapping and torture, as they should have been. But now the usual subjects can claim that white people and Trump supporters are in danger from Black Lives Matter thugs.
Good job, good effort, gang.
Anyway back to the Rad Stuff.
Raddest Thing of the Week Nominee #2: Jack in the Box Tacos
Reader Brendan from Santa Monica brought this Wall Street Journal article about Jack in the Box tacos, “Americans Eat 554 Million Jack in the Box Tacos a Year, and No One Knows Why.” I’ll tell you why: they are cheap and delicious.
The filling is also of controversial provenance. My brother once asked the woman behind the counter of a Salinas Jack in the Box what kind of meat was in the tacos, and she said, “Carne de soy.” And it’s a widely held belief that the tacos are vegetarian, although there does appear to at least some beef in the mixture (also, guy, is it possible the employee didn’t purposely “mislead” you? Maybe fast food workers have shitty pay and training and she just didn’t know.).
Anyway in addition to the celebrity fans listed in the article, we also get news that hipster foodies are planning to create versions of the tacos with fancy ingredients that sell for $18 for 3. That misses the entire fucking point of Jack in the Box tacos, which is that they are 2 for $.99 (in Franklin, TN yesterday, they were actually 2 for $1.19).
Don’t fuck up a good thing.
Raddest Thing of the Week: The Cool Teen Dabbing on Paul Ryan
Nice work son. Dab on them Fools. When you’re no longer grounded I hope you go out and get hella Jack in the Box tacos. You’ve earned them.
