Hold on for One More Day
The Carnie and Wendy Wilson of newsletters is doing cartwheels for Auntie E, begrudgingly queuing up, and learning about the versatility of dental molding gel.
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Spreaderific Sisterhood,
Does anything besides the fact that E. Jean got PAID this week actually matter? Not really. But in between our whooping and hollering and general merriment, we couldn’t help but notice that we’d been flooded yet again by (mostly) male “maxxing” content. Um, lucky us? In the New York Times, Spread-beloved pontificator Kate Manne, PhD, cast her expert gaze on a thing we talk about quite a bit around here: the fact that men are now up against the looksist pressure and perfectionism that’s always been placed on women. On Reddit, dudes commonly blame this amplified need to be chiseled on women (of course) who are just so darn picky and mean, rejecting “mid” lookers on dating apps. In truth, Manne points out, the call is coming from inside the house. Trad men are doing this to impress the people whose esteem and opinion has always mattered most in their eyes—other men—in order to “increase their masculine status.” Think about it: If the looksmaxxers of the world really cared what women think, they wouldn’t look like that.
Masculine status, you say? The New Yorker‘s Zach Helfand serves up the headline of the week, “Rope-A-Dope,” in a somewhat late but, true to style, exceedingly complete look at the end-of-days pro-doping competition the Enhanced Games, aka the Steroid Olympics—an event cofounded by Aron D’Souza (best known for orchestrating Peter Thiel’s takedown of Gawker via a Hulk Hogan-shaped Trojan Horse) that took place in Las Vegas in May. Lots of detail here about, say, the swimmer’s lats that “oozed out of the sides of his swimsuit” (male-on-male gaze alert!), but our takeaway (and the Times’s) is that all this theater is really a ploy to promote Enhanced’s budding direct-to-consumer peptide/testosterone business. Because that’s the water we’re swimming in, so to speak.
Somebody say peptides? A team from Bloomberg Businessweek got deep into the (optimized) bowels of that billion-dollar gold rush, hunting down a peptide-testing entrepreneur outside Prague who drives a purple Ferrari, wears socks with his sandals, and goes by the name “Magic.” Now that’s some reportin’! There’s been much talk about the “gray market,” but what even is that, really? (Gray goods are legal but unauthorized; black goods are definitely illegal.) The story tracks the legal loopholes—it’s not illegal to buy an unapproved peptide, and no one’s looking too closely at who’s selling raw materials; a “for research only” sticker on the side of a vial apparently buys a hell of a lot of leeway—that bring Chinese “research chemicals” to a wild array of places, starting with the maxxers’ bloodstreams, obviously, but also to a meeting of the “California Peptide Club” at a San Francisco mansion, and to the prescription pad of a w-i-l-d doctor in Michigan, who is Rxing untested peptides like they’re going out of style. We can’t help but think that, under a less hokum-loving presidential administration, this woman would be doling out pills in an underground bunker—not being photographed by Bloomberg Businessweek.
On a sweeter note, when academic Sebastian Langdell wanted to get fit, he briefly tried life in the bro lane, but the Peter Attia of it all just made him feel empty inside. (Also: so much bad advice!) So he sought out “visions of fitness that avoid overemphasis on masculinity” from people like cartoonist Alison Bechdel, novelist Laura van den Berg, and poet Hanif Abdurraqib. (Non-insane fitness enthusiasts are largely women. Huh.) “These artists weren’t going on about perfect blood panels or maximum efficiency or tracking immense protein intake,” he writes. “They cared about feeling alive in their bodies, sleeping well and having the stamina to do meaningful work.” If anyone has tips on where to find that kind of fitness influencer, keep us posted.
OK can we please get back to talking about women?
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Already head-boppin’ at the mere suggestion of this week’s headline?Break free from the chain and treat yourself to Naomi Fry’s “The Summer I Surrendered to Wilson Phillips.”
P.P.S. If you’re happy to be here in Spreadlandia, let us know by hitting that ❤️ button, sweetpea.
Still ahead: A Brock Colyar special (with a free link!). The latest chapter in the Alice Seybold saga. The dick pic’s 1970s predecessor. Rebecca Traister goes full scorched earth. Paid subscribers, this one’s for you….
