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While America has been conducting a years-long emergency investigation into which teenager is allowed to play which sport, this week, Congress is considering a bill that could change who actually has power in college sports. The Protect College Sports Act (ugh the name itself is so deceptive) would set new federal rules around how athletes get paid, when they can transfer, and how much freedom the NCAA and conferences have to make the rules. Labor groups warn the bill gives way too much power back to the institutions that spent decades making billions while athletes fought for a piece of it. Athletes are workers, and this bill effectively says yeah no you’re not. Athletes would keep making their schools and NCAA billions of dollars while having absolutely no ability to negotiate or start a union.

This is where I become a little confused. Because I was told there was a national emergency happening in women’s sports. I was told we needed to Protect Female Athletes™, urgently and preferably on cable news. And yet when Congress starts debating the actual money, power, and legal rights of college athletes, suddenly everyone has errands to run or somewhere else to be. It’s almost like some people only discover their passion for women’s sports when a trans kid gets within a five-mile radius of one.

Maybe that’s because protecting women is always easier when the threat can be turned into a person. Preferably a teenager, and preferably someone you can put in a headline to scare people who have three jobs and can’t afford rent and need someone to blame. Systems are considerably less fun to yell about because they require reading PDFs and learning words like “capital gains” and unfortunately there is no viral video of an the tax code winning the 400-meter freestyle.

None of this means the Protect College Sports Act is a simple story. It includes some benefits for athletes, but the fight is over what athletes receive in return and how much power institutions like the NCAA should have over the people generating the product. It would be extremely difficult for athletes to start unions, or have any negotiation power so their rights as workers would essentially be completly eroded.

Critics also warn that the bill would erode Title IX in college athletics. Title IX is the 1972 law that basically built women's sports, the reason schools have to offer women real scholarships, facilities, and opportunities, and the main tool athletes have when they don't. Critics say weakening it just as the money in college sports explodes would make it harder for women athletes to push back when a school decides their team is a lower priority.

So if your political awakening began with a passionate concern for the wellbeing of female athletes, congratulations!!! There are suddenly a lot of you and I'm glad you're here. Because women in sports are affected by money, working conditions, health care, scholarships, bargaining power, and who gets to write the rules they live under. If you’re passionate about female sports, prove it. Call your senators before the final vote and ask them what this bill does to Title IX enforcement and to athletes' rights as workers. Tell them you’re concerned. Look up whether your local school or your alma mater gives its women's teams the same facilities, coaching, and scholarship money as the men's teams, because that's what Title IX is for, and complaints are how it gets enforced. Follow the athlete groups fighting for scholarships, health care, and a seat at the table. And somehow none of those things involve a 14-year-old girl trying to make the bowling team. Hopefully you can still care.

If you need a laugh, the latest episode of Boy Problems is out! David Farrier, his dog, and my new boyfriend join us to answer your questions about the ethics of girl best friends. The dog had the most reasonable takes :)

We also get into what Nathan Fielder is actually like IRL (spoiler: he somehow did David’s signature move… TO DAVID), a wildly brilliant New Zealand website helping women anonymously report predators and find community, and a listener Boy Problem involving two beds + a female best friend. 👀

Next week, we have an iconic conversation with THE Elizabeth Chambers. You won’t want to miss it. 

🔔 Subscribe so you never miss an episode. 

🐶 Help Alan the rescue dog find a home! If you’re in LA and want to adopt Alan, email David at davidfarrier@protonmail.com

0:00 - Intro & David's Rescue Dog Alan1:32 - Alan Gets A Boner On Camera5:07 - Liz Meets Her Boyfriend Through David9:32 - David Farrier Walks Like There's An Emergency15:40 - Nathan Fielder In Real Life23:59 - The Website Catching Predators30:37 - Men vs Women: Worst Dates34:15 - Boy Problem: Two Beds, One Red Flag43:17 - The Elon Musk Problem48:50 - Duct Tape Men More

I opened the internet today to discover that men were once again being forced to defend their right to like boobs, a right I had not realized was under attack.

This is my takeaway from the Sydney Sweeney gambling ad discourse, at least according to the right wing corner of the internet, where men have rushed heroically into battle to defend Sydney Sweeney’s rack from the feminists who were, unfortunately, talking about gambling.

You have to admire the speed of the pivot. Women say, “Hey, maybe using one of the most famous women alive to entice young men into gambling is a little predatory,” and within minutes some guy is posting a photo of the female journalist who said it so everyone can assess whether she is hot enough to have an opinion.

And this isn't even new. Sean Duffy (yes that one, the sitting U.S. Secretary of Transportation) articulated the broader argument with refreshing simplicity in a recent resurfaced clip on the reality show he films with his wife question mark??? Duffy said Sweeney's breasts "make us want to reproduce." Men like Sydney Sweeney's boobs. Men are allowed to like Sydney Sweeney's boobs. Stop shaming men for liking Sydney Sweeney's boobs. I mean, great. That's settled. This is reassuring because I had spent exactly zero minutes worrying that men might stop liking boobs. Congratulations to Sydney Sweeney’s rack, which have once again survived an attack no one launched!

Nobody is asking heterosexual men to look at Sydney Sweeney and feel nothing. The fact that men find her attractive is, quite literally, her business model. I want more for her, but unfortunately she seems to be indulging in this right now, and that’s her choice, regardless of how I personally feel about it.

But what’s strange is how thoroughly the sexualized framing manages to launder the actual controversy here. Sweeney is advertising Novig, a sports prediction platform in which she has an equity stake. The campaign takes one of the most desirable women alive, puts her naked body front and center, and uses male desire as the bait for a product designed to make money when men lose theirs. If the guys rushing to defend Sydney Sweeney’s boobs had a brain, maybe they’d notice that the critique was never the boobs. It’s what the boobs are being used to sell.

And the fact is, Sydney Sweeney’s ad is targeting a generation of men who are, by nearly every available metric, doing worse than the men who came before them. Great news if your business model requires desperate guys with phones. And by the way, this isn’t just a vibe. I’ve documented on this very newsletter, at frankly exhausting length, exactly how badly men are doing. Men’s real earnings have fallen roughly 10 percent since 1979 even as women’s have risen, which is also, not incidentally, why the gender pay gap has narrowed, since part of the “progress” is just men earning less and five rich guys hoarding all the money. Nearly 80 percent of suicides in the US are men. A quarter of young men aged 15 to 34 report feeling lonely “a lot of the day.” Men with few or no close friends are up to 60 percent more likely to report depression. Men are 3.3 times more likely than women to die what researchers now flatly call “deaths of despair,” suicide, overdose, alcohol. I wrote about all of in my book this in For the Love of Men. But instead of asking how to solve the male loneliness crisis, gambling apps are asking: how do we monetize it?

Lonely broke men is the actual demographic being advertised to. Not “men,” in the abstract, chest-thumping sense, but a specific, documented population of down bad, lonely, anxious guys the gambling industry has done its homework on. Nearly half of men aged 18 to 49 have an online sportsbook account. Among men 18 to 30, about 10 percent show signs of problem gambling, more than three times the rate in the general population. And research has found that the financial damage from legalized sports betting is especially pronounced among young men in low-income counties. Legalized sports betting has been linked to increases in debt, bankruptcies, collections and delinquencies. Turns out the people who can least afford to lose are still extremely profitable when they do.

And the “let men enjoy boobs” framing works so well as a distraction because it flatters the very audience being hunted: you are not a target, you are a red-blooded man exercising an ancient right, and anyone raising questions is the one with the problem. Meanwhile nobody has to talk about why a guy already earning less than his father, already more isolated and depressed than any generation on record, is being sold a fantasy of financial rescue by a naked woman, with real debt on the other side of it. But sure, the real threat to broke men is the feminist who would like them to keep their money. Apparently exploiting male loneliness is fine as long as the customer feels masculine while it happens.

So let the record show: men may continue to find Sydney Sweeney attractive. Feminists aren’t mad about that. That right was never revoked. Because we have a far bigger problem on our hands. Sydney Sweeney’s boobs are going to be fine. It’s the bank accounts of the men defending them that we’re worried about.

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If you need a laugh, watch our latest episode of Boy Problems, where we tackle the very important question: should we be duct taping racist men more?

x Liz

Yes. That Chris Brown. The man who pleaded guilty to felony assault after attacking Rihanna. The same man whose career continues to thrive despite years of additional arrests, restraining orders, and guilty pleas.

This is where I take is…

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It lasted maybe four seconds.

It happened at the ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of September 11, when a camera landed on NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She had walked up to greet him. They smiled. Maybe they laughed. We don’t actually know what was said because the clip has no audio. But what happened next for some reason became a scandal.

Within hours, Ted Cruz was demanding to know why Mamdani and AOC dared “laugh” while victims’ names were read. Meghan McCain was cursing them out on Twitter. A Republican congressman was calling Mamdani a “jihadi” who “mocks” the country. The clip ricocheted across conservative media as proof of contempt, disrespect, moral rot. Trump was seen on tape laughing while greeting people as well by the way. For some reason, that didn’t make headlines. I wonder why….

A private, human moment, stretched into a national scandal because two people who aren’t supposed to look at ease in public dared to look at ease in public. If this story does not feel new, it’s because it’s a very old one, wearing a new outfit.

Under Jim Crow, one of the most strongly held norms was to never laugh at a white person. This wasn’t even subtext, it was written down and documented. Alongside the codified laws segregating buses, schools, and water fountains, there was an entire unwritten rulebook historians call “Jim Crow etiquette.” Stetson Kennedy, who documented it in his 1959 Jim Crow Guide, listed the norms Black Americans were expected to live by in front of white people: never contradict a white person, never claim superior knowledge, never curse a white person, and never ever laugh, derisively or otherwise, at one. Black joy itself could be read as an act of defiance, and defiance could get you killed, by white violence.

The vanilla ice cream story is one I come back to often because it shows just how far the effort to deny joy to anyone who wasn’t white could reach, all the way down to something as small and ordinary as a scoop of ice cream. Maya Angelou wrote about it in her memoir: “People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July 4th. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.” Audre Lorde recounted something similar, a soda-fountain waitress refusing to serve her family vanilla ice cream on a childhood trip. There’s no statute on the books that explicitly banned it; this was custom, not code, enforced parlour by parlour rather than legislature by legislature. But that’s almost the whole point. You don’t need a law when the social order enforces itself. A pleasure this small was still treated as something that needed rationing. Black people weren’t just denied joy while they were alive, they were denied peace.

And this wasn’t only enforced in life. Some Jim Crow laws barred Black people from being buried in the same cemeteries as white people at all. They were forced to live on separate grounds, separate plots, separate rest. Denying joy was never just about controlling how Black people lived. It was about controlling their peace, full stop, right down to where their bodies were allowed to lie once there was nothing left to police. They weren’t just denied peace when they were alive, they were denied peace even once they were dead.

Put those two things side by side and a pattern comes into focus that goes beyond “people of color were treated badly.” It’s more specific than that: there was something about Black happiness, in particular, that read to white society as intolerable. It’s almost like it was seen as unearned delight? The happiness of peope of color was not just frowned upon, it was policed.

When I watched the backlash against a smile shared between two of the most visible political leaders of color, I thought about Kamala Harris and the way her laugh became more than a source of ridicule. Somehow, it was turned into evidence that she wasn’t serious enough, capable enough, or competent enough for the highest office in the country. Compilations of her laughing were cut together and passed around as proof she was unserious, untrustworthy, unstable. It became a meme, then a permanent line of attack, then, for a while, shorthand for her entire public identity, and how unserious she was, despite running against arguably the most clownish political figure in modern american history.

Nobody does this to a white male politician’s laugh with the same relentlessness. Nobody builds a four-year content pipeline out of Joe Biden’s grin, or any of the white senators who have laughed at genuinely inappropriate moments and been forgotten by the next news cycle. The reaction to Harris was never really about the sound she makes when amused. It’s about who gets to be seen as composed by default, and who has to prove it, moment by moment, for their entire public life.

And even if you don’t laugh and hide your joy, you’re told you’re still not smiling enough. Michelle Obama has written extensively about how easily a neutral expression or moment of seriousness could be folded into the image already being constructed around her: disgruntled, hostile, the “angry Black woman.” She understood that her face itself was being read through a stereotype, and that she was expected to project a level of warmth and grace that others could take for granted.

Mamdani gets an extra layer here too, outlets covering the clip made a point of mentioning he’s Muslim right next to the words “disrespect” and “mockery,” as a way to not-so-subtely point to his religion as somehow the source of a disrespect he never showed.

Evidence to support racist assumptions in an agneda to assign incompetence to people who are otherwise, extremely popular. From the ice cream counter to the cable news chyron, the throughline holds: it was never really about the smile, it’s about who’s allowed to have one.

Here’s the thing, though: no matter how many clips they spread, people of color’s joy has always won. It won in the Jim Crow era, when people found a way to smile anyway. And it’s winning now. Mamdani has been turned into a boogeyman by people who’ve never met him, and he’s still one of the most popular mayors in the country, I mean he is popular enough that influencers want to collab with him not for the money, but for the likability they’ll glean from his. He’s going to keep smiling. And AOC will keep smiling too. Her series on egg freezing got billions of impressions and got so much attention the right tried to go after her for wanting to be a mom………. question mark?? I’d be smiling too.

So for the people who are hot and bothered by a person of color’s joy, maybe spend less time analyzing their smile and more time examining what your outrage over it reveals about you. If their smile lives rent-free in your head, that’s on you.

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In my book For The Love of Men, I earnestly wrote about male loneliness, only to watch my data get used to prosecute women for a crime patriarchy committed. I drew attention to male depression and the epidemic of male suicide. I devoted an entire chapter to men’s friendships and their lack of depth and meaning. I wrote about how men felt disposable unless they could provide, how terrified they were of vulnerability, and how we needed to adapt therapy to better meet their needs. I wrote about men who could name only two emotions when I asked them how they felt. I wrote about the toys they were told they weren’t allowed to play with and explained that girls had been freed from their gender prison, but boys hadn’t.

I even wrote about the absurdity of American men having greater access to a gun than a therapist. I talked about the professions men traditionally relied on being lost to globalization, their skills becoming less valued, and the fact that the jobs they still disproportionately perform tend to be riskier.

I spent four years interviewing men and researching the ways our definition of masculinity was making men miserable. I argued that patriarchy doesn’t only restrict women. It also teaches boys that sadness is weakness, intimacy is feminine, asking for help is failure, their bodies should be invulnerable, and their worth comes from how much they can provide. Contemporary coverage of the book described precisely that argument: traditional male socialization and emotional suppression were hurting men’s emotional wellbeing and contributing to larger social harms.

And then, over the next seven years, I watched the manosphere take the exact same talking points I had used against patriarchy and use them against women like me. They took my diagnosis and decided women were the disease.

The manosphere started talking about what feminists like me had been talking about for years: depressed men, sexless men, directionless men, men without community, men who felt rejected by women and forgotten by society.

But instead of being shown that the cage they were trapped in was patriarchy, the manosphere gave them an answer that was much easier than liberation: blame the broads. And the men finding these spaces really were hurting. One study comparing incels with other men found that incels reported significantly more loneliness, less social support, more symptoms of depression and anxiety, and lower self-esteem. Another found greater depressive symptoms, rejection sensitivity and insecure attachment among incels. An ethnographic study of men drawn to the pickup community found loneliness, lack of male role models, and mental-health struggles among the recurring reasons men sought these spaces in the first place.

So the pain was real, but the diagnosis they were handed was the lie. Research on the manosphere has found that these communities can exploit precisely those vulnerabilities by telling men that feminism is the root of their problems, while portraying women as a threat and feminism as something that has diminished men’s economic, romantic and social prospects. A 2026 analysis goes even further, finding a zero-sum worldview in which women’s progress is understood as something that must have come at men’s expense. Instead of asking men to interrogate the rules that had made them miserable, the manosphere offered them something infinitely more seductive: someone else to blame.

So sometimes I hear these manosphere guys with ring lights start talking and have the deeply uncomfortable experience of thinking: wait, I know this part. I know this stat. I made this argument. Except they’re using the same evidence I used to show men how patriarchy was hurting them to convince men they need even more of it. I wanted to free men from the cage. They turned the cage into a brand.

And this is where we take radically different exits off the same highway. I looked at sad lonely men and thought: maybe we should make it easier for men to love each other, and easier for them love women back. The manosphere looked at lonely men and asked: how can we blame women for more stuff? It inflated the role of feminism, talked about the empowerment of women like a rapist wasn’t the leader of the free world and like women hadn’t watched him roll ball their most fundamental basic human rights. They inflated the role of men are protectors of women while most of the men in this country preferred to elect a sexual predator over a Black woman who smiled too much.

And yet, even after campaigning and traveling to swing states with the explicit purpose to change men’s minds, I looked at male depression and thought: maybe telling boys to suppress every emotion except anger has consequences. I kept choosing hope over hate. I kept believing in men despite them disappointing me and other women, at every turn.

But my hope, and the hope of so many women who understood how deeply patriarchy was hurting men, was no match for the firehose of the manosphere. Because liberation is hard. It asks you to go inward, interrogate what you were taught, grieve what you were denied, and take responsibility for who you become next. The manosphere offered something much easier: blame your mother, blame your ex-girlfriend, blame the woman who rejected you, blame the woman who never wanted to date you in the first place. Why dismantle the cage when someone will hand you a list of women to blame for being inside it?

When I was writing For the Love of Men, I looked at men who felt their only value was providing and thought: what an unbearably small definition of a human life. Meanwhile, the manosphere looked at those men and said: correct, now become even more separate from what makes you human.

In my book, I warned about the radicalization of young men. What I couldn't have imagined was that the very arguments I was making to help free men from patriarchy would one day be repackaged to pull them deeper into it, amplified by algorithms and platforms whose power we were only beginning to understand. I thought I was giving men language to understand their pain. I didn't know how easily that same pain could be given a new vocabulary, a new villain, and billions of views.

Perhaps the darkest example is male suicide. I wrote about suicide because I wanted us to ask why being a man could make asking for help feel so impossible. In manosphere-adjacent discourse, that same devastating statistic can become evidence in a prosecution of feminism and women. And the research backs this up. Scientists studying anti-feminist discourse have documented claims explicitly blaming feminism, family courts and women for male suicide.

Same wounded men. I diagnosed patriarchy, and they diagnosed women.

And seven years later, I think that’s the part I didn’t understand enough when I wrote the book. I thought the danger was that nobody was talking about men’s pain and how connected it was to ours. How women and men were set up to think we are different, when we share the same pain. I didn’t spend nearly enough time thinking about how an entire internet ecosystem made up of con artists and predators would use my research and feminist scholarship about men, against us.

The manosphere didn’t invent men’s suffering, it just found an effective way to narrate it back to men and give them a quick fix rather than the more complicated work of self-improvement and self-reflection needed for real change. It’s why these men are only getting more and more miserable. I mean if the manosphere was really offering them a solution, wouldn’t it have worked by now? If Andrew Tate knows how to be a man, why did his version of masculinity landed him in jail? Is this the ideal young men are seeking for their lives?

So as I thought about what has changed since I first published my book, I started wondering what I would change if I were writing it today. I still believe deeply in empathy, but I understand its limits differently now. Empathy is powerful, but we have to make sure it doesn’t become a way of coddling people who are also being asked to grow.

Male loneliness is real, but today I would emphasize far more forcefully that women are not responsible for curing it. Male depression is real, but feminists did not cause it. In fact, as I laid out in my book, men in more feminist countries tend to be happier and healthier. Patriarchy is killing men, and instead of being guided to examine the system that is hurting them, legions of young men are being told to swim deeper into it. We are watching drowning men get sold more ocean. The manosphere is selling men masculinity to cure the wounds masculinity gave them.

But here’s what I wouldn’t change. I still love men, and thats’s because of the idea of love I was taught by my heroes. I wanted men to feel invited into feminism, to understand that liberation could make them freer too. I was inspired by bell hooks, Gloria Steinem, and particularly James Baldwin, who once wrote of loving America so deeply that he insisted on the right to criticize her perpetually.

I think about Baldwin’s definition a lot. Love doesn’t mean shielding someone from criticism. Sometimes criticism is what love looks like when you believe someone is capable of more. Seven years later, I don’t love men any less. I just expect more of them.

And perhaps that’s the irony I couldn’t have imagined when I published a book called For the Love of Men. Almost a decade later, the people who claim to defend men now seem to have remarkably little faith in them. Their definition of love is telling men what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. They tell men their loneliness is women’s fault, their rejection is feminism’s fault, their unhappiness is society’s fault, and their salvation lies in becoming an exaggerated version of the very man they were already exhausted from trying to become.

Maybe loving men means having the courage to tell them the truth. You are hurting, but you are not helpless. You were shaped by forces you didn’t choose, but you still get to choose who you become. The manosphere loves men by asking nothing of them. I love men enough to believe they can be more. And I still do. Maybe that’s what loving men actually looks like. Because if expecting men to grow makes me a man-hater, what does building an entire ideology around the belief that they never will make you? Maybe the real man-haters were the manosphere guys all along, because nobody thinks less of men than the men who insist they can’t change.

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And if you need a fun little chaser after all that, listen to the latest episode of Boy Problems!! We discuss the feminist implications of Phoebe Bridgers’ leg hair, duct tape as a tool of women’s liberation, and how, against all available evidence and several structural disadvantages, I somehow landed a boyfriend.

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Progressive creators across the country are officially using thirst traps for good - and it WORKED. More than 26,000 people have signed up to be poll workers this week because of creators. Turns out protecting democracy is objectively attractive. So, whether you sign up to be a poll worker yourself, share this video with five friends and check their registration status, or just post your own cheeky photo for the cause — every bit counts. We're 60 days out from the midterms, divas!!! Tell me in the comments: Are you registered to vote? What are you doing for democracy this election? And don’t forget to subscribe to my Substack. We’re figuring this out together, one thirst trap at a time.💅

Sign up as a poll worker using my unique link here!

This week, we’re getting into that, paying tribute to the icon Gloria Steinem, and revisiting her wildest undercover stunts, funniest quotes, and her theory that patriarchy is still a prison for men, it's just “cushy.” Plus: Phoebe Bridgers’ leg hair, why the queer Ultimatum is infinitely more watchable, what’s actually behind the orgasm gap, and our boy problem of the week: why do I only want men who are already taken?

If you love the show, subscribe and leave a review. Our Boy Problems family wouldn’t be the same without you, and keeps growing thanks to your comments, subscribes, and shares with a friend or two. It makes all the difference and helps us compete with the manosphere, too!

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Check out⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Airplane Mode with Liz Plank⁠⁠⁠⁠ on Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

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Read Gloria Steinem's essay "If Men Could Menstruate!"

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Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, international bestselling author, and producer of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media and NBC News. She currently hosts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Boy Problems⁠⁠⁠⁠, a podcast that tackles love, masculinity, dating disasters, and life’s biggest questions.

00:00 Intro: What's Coming Up01:21 A Man Got Duct-Taped to His Airplane Seat12:05 Remembering Gloria Steinem17:05 The Ultimatum: Why the Queer Season Wins28:10 Phoebe Bridgers, Leg Hair & the Red Carpet Double Standard32:08 Boy Problem: Chasing Guys Who Are Already Taken48:22 Listener Comments & Nick Update49:42 Patreon Recap: Body Counts & First Dates51:28 Outro & Thank You

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Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, international bestselling author, and producer of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media and NBC News. She currently hosts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Boy Problems⁠⁠⁠⁠, a podcast that tackles love, masculinity, dating disasters, and life’s biggest questions.

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0:00 Intro

1:37 Nick is Back (Debunking the Bob Allegations)

4:30 Daisy Chains Festival Recap

10:06 Meet TGF: Soft Launch vs. Hard Launch

14:21 Private Equity Boyfriends & Recession Indicators

28:09 Boy Problem: Can We Fix His PE?

48:41 Patreon Teaser: Body Counts with Bianca

50:13 Outro

The first time I moved to the US, I interned at the Feminist Majority Foundation, the organization behind Ms. magazine, which Gloria co-founded in 1972. I helped start feminist clubs on college campuses across the South. I stood outside abortion clinics in North Carolina as part of clinic defense. I sat through hearings on Capitol Hill where lawmakers debated whether Roe v. Wade deserved to survive another attack. I was fresh out of college, but getting to be part of Gloria’s foundation was the honor of a lifetime.

I was twenty-two years old and overwhelmed. I was also convinced that history naturally bent toward justice because I happened to be standing among people trying to bend it.

When I look at these photos now, the optimism on my face makes my heart ache. I had no idea how much harder things were about to get. No idea how many rights would come under attack. How much would be taken from us. I may have been cringe but I was free. Free in ways I didn't yet know were fragile. Looking back, I'm grateful she didn't know what was coming. She believed the future could only get bigger. And maybe that's what every movement needs: people naïve enough to imagine a better world before anyone else can see it.

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The female orgasm recession got more visibility lately, when a young “looksmaxxing” influencer went viral for explaining that making a woman orgasm was essentially a bad investment. The additional 15 or 30 minutes it might require, he reasoned, could be more productively spent elsewhere, like taking an important phone call. I’m not even kidding.

What is remarkable is less the statement itself than how neatly it fits into a larger philosophy of heterosexual sex that has been flourishing online, one in which intimacy is understood through the language of markets, leverage, status and diminishing returns. Fresh & Fit host Myron Gaines has argued that a man who goes down on his girlfriend is being subservient in a segment he called "Even GOD doesn't care about a woman's orgasm."The implication is revealing: giving a woman pleasure is not merely an inefficient use of time, but potentially a surrender of power. Yikes.

Now this would be easier to laugh off as extremely-online nonsense if heterosexual men were actually delivering. It’s 2026, and the numbers still aren’t close. A study of nearly 25,000 American adults found men orgasm up to 95% of the time during sex, compared to 65% for women. The women’s orgasm recession shows up in every single age group. Two decades of better sex ed, more open conversations about consent, and mainstream awareness that the clitoris exists have done shockingly little to close it.

Men don’t even seem to know it’s happening. In one national survey, 85 percent of men reported that their partner had orgasmed the last time they had sex, while only 64 percent of women say they did. The discrepancy is almost touching in its optimism: an enormous population of men appears to be leaving sexual encounters under the impression that everyone had a wonderful time, when they may have been the only ones who did.

And it’s not for lack of information. We know, with almost comical specificity, what helps close the gap: oral sex, manual stimulation, kissing, the basic acknowledgment that penetration is not the only activity available to two naked people. In one survey of more than 50,000 adults, 80 percent of straight women and 91 percent of lesbian women reported orgasming when sex included a combination of genital stimulation, deep kissing and oral sex. And yet roughly one in three men still believed intercourse was the most effective way to make a woman orgasm. If I had emojis on my keyboard, this is where I would insert the facepalm emoji. The information isn’t missing. We have simply accumulated decades of increasingly specific knowledge about female pleasure while heterosexual sex remains remarkably resistant to reorganizing itself around any of it.

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We need to talk about the head gap. Research on heterosexual couples has found that women are twice as likely to give oral sex without receiving it, an imbalance made stranger by the fact that men report enjoying giving oral sex more than women report enjoying giving it to men. There is something almost impressive about this arrangement: heterosexual culture has managed to produce a sexual norm in which women disproportionately perform an act they enjoy less, for partners who don’t even need it to climax. Meanwhile, the act that men apparently enjoy giving, and that can actually help close the orgasm gap, remains somehow negotiable. The head gap, like the orgasm gap, starts to look less mysterious the longer you stare at it. We know what women like, we know what helps them come, and we have simply organized heterosexual sex around something else.

So why aren’t more men buying vibrators? The vibrator has somehow acquired a strange symbolic power in heterosexual sex. For some men, its appearance in bed seems to register as an accusation, evidence that whatever they were doing before it arrived had been insufficient. But this requires believing that sex is primarily a demonstration of male competence, rather than a collaborative attempt to make everyone involved feel good. Nobody considers a whisk an insult to a chef or a power drill a humiliation for a carpenter! Tools are useful precisely because human beings figured out that getting the desired result matters more than proving you could have achieved it with your bare hands. But somehow the vibrator is stigmatized rather than commonly bought or used by men with their partner.

The orgasm gap, after all, is not suffering from a lack of information. We know that women who receive oral sex, manual stimulation and more varied forms of sexual attention orgasm more frequently. We also know that women are perfectly capable of producing the desired result themselves. A 2025 study of women over 60 found that frequent sex toy users were significantly more likely to report consistently orgasming. There is something both encouraging and faintly ridiculous about reaching this point in the scientific literature: the female orgasm exists! We know how to produce it! So why are we still acting weird about using the very tools that help us get there? Somehow the vibrator remains coded as a backup plan, an intervention brought in when sex has failed, rather than what it more obviously is: technology that makes sex better. In some bedrooms, it’s even considered taboo, despite being the main way women can achieve climax.

Which leaves us with the less scientific question of why women should continue treating their own pleasure as something another person gets to determine. Bringing a vibrator into bed does not have to constitute an emergency intervention or a referendum on anyone’s sexual abilities. It can simply be part of sex. The female orgasm recession begins to look considerably more manageable once women stop waiting for the market to correct itself.

Which, conveniently, brings me to a vibrator I personally love, and the sponsor helping support the research and writing behind a piece I’ve been wanting to write for a very long time!

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I should disclose that I have personally diversified my portfolio. While certain men are conducting cost benefit analyses on whether my orgasm generates sufficient returns, I have the Womanizer Liberty Next, a compact clitoral stimulator whose Pleasure Air 3D technology is designed to mimic oral sex, you know the thing that every study shows improves your chance of having an orgasm?! It has three depth levels and eight intensity settings, and is equally excellent whether you want to take matters into your own hands or bring it into bed with someone else.

This is also where I would like to formally release men from the completely unnecessary burden of competing with vibrators. The Liberty Next can be something you use together. In fact, nothing says sexual confidence quite like being interested in the outcome rather than obsessed with receiving sole credit for it. Alone, together, whatever works. We are trying to end a recession here.

Speaking of recessions, I’m excited to offer you a discount because, at this point, we could all use a little economic relief. Use code LIZ20 for 20% off. Consider it your personal stimulus package :)

If you want to hear from one of the good guys, check out this Boy Problems episode. I sat down with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, host of Recess Therapy, to talk about what kids can teach us about love, friendship, vulnerability, and the emotional honesty so many adults lose along the way. It’s funny, unexpectedly moving, and one of my favorite conversations we’ve had. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

x Liz

The Cut recently published an essay that ricocheted across group chats, and if you haven’t read it, here’s the gist: gen z women are paying rent for boyfriends who don’t work. Young women are running the household, managing the emotional labor, and functionally becoming a second mother to grown men who call themselves “partners.” While the internet overflows with “stay-at-home girlfriend” content, young women self-pedestalizing their lifestyle of bottomless matcha and pilates, bankrolled by a rich boyfriend, there’s a quieter trend nobody seems eager to talk about: men coasting off their girlfriend’s salary and domestic labor while she works herself to the bone.

The piece is being framed as an indictment of men, and it’s not wrong about that part. The dating pool is rough right now. We talk about it every week on our podcast Boy Problems.

Chanté Joseph’s said it perfectly in her essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing?” Her mega viral piece kicked off a conversation about why having a boyfriend isn’t the status symbol it once was, and why some women are actively hiding their relationships, both online and off. But The Cut essay made me feel something different. I found myself feeling an uncomfortable feeling. I almost felt more embarrassed for the women than for the men. The men were acting like babies, but why were the girlfriends acting like mommies? Nobody was making them hold a diaper bag, so why were they voluntarily doing it? If women don’t want man-children, why are they adopting them? As I scrolled through hundreds of comments roasting men who turn their girlfriends into moms, I couldn’t stop thinking: what if the most embarrassing thing about modern womanhood isn’t the men we’re with, but who we become around them? There’s a part of the gender revolution that women rarely want to admit, that I myself ignored for years, the part of us that keeps us tethered to losers.

To be abundantly clear, I’m on the side of women. They did not create this problem. Overly nurturing women feel compelled to baby their boyfriend’s for a number of reasons.

One of the reasons women are becoming grown men’s moms instead of their girlfriends, is what I like to call the gender swag gap. It’s the defining problem of modern heterosexual dating. We have data showing male underemployment, declining workforce participation, the retreat into video games and porn, and a generation of men who seem stuck in prolonged adolescence existing alongside a generation of women who had to become more educated, more independent, and more ambitious than society wanted them to be. One group got free from the patriarchy, and the other seeped more deeply into it.This profound gap is creating a heterosexual pickle that threatens the very future of romance. Something is broken, and while women aren’t the ones who broke it, they are expected to lower to shield men from the responsibility of solving it.

“Men are lonely” has become a conversation that too often ends by asking what women should do about it instead of what men should do about it. This is why so many women are mothering men. We’ve grown up being taught that women are the ones can change men. But when it comes to our dynamics in heterosexual partnerships, the idea that women are valid rehab centers for men who are drunk on the patriarchy is like poison for romance. A dating strategy that depends on men’s hypothetical growth is not how you build vibrant relationships.

But while women are always expected to solve the things that men broke, the discourse leaves out one thing: their agency. Sure, gen z men certainly seem to be expecting women to cater to them, but if women have the money and the power in the relationship, why are they giving it up? And of course I know there are numerous social forces at play that strip them of that power. The way women and men are socialized is very different and women are encouraged to over-nurture others and are punished when they don’t. But are women really powerless or did they just forget how powerful they really are? If we want real change, we need to acknowledge the freedom women have. And no longer making it women’s job to get men sober from the patriarchy is a good place to start.

The patriarchy is making men sick, but it’s the hope women keep holding onto, that these men will eventually get sober from it, that’s making them even sicker.

And I say this as a woman who wrote an entire ass book about believing men can change. Women have to come to terms that the men in the dating pool are the men in the dating pool. And no amount of training wheels will make them suitable partners unless they decide to free themselves from the shackles of their minds.

So ladies, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this: the only way to stop being a man’s mommy is to stop being his mommy. The conversation has become almost entirely about the men who lack ambition and expect women to fix their lives. And we absolutely need to talk about that. But why aren’t we talking about the women who accept those terms and conditions and participate in their own mommyfication? If the system is broken and men are clinging to patriarchal ideals of masculinity instead of rejecting them, the rational response isn’t to move into the wreckage and start doing its laundry. The harder response is telling him he can only stay over if he starts doing his own laundry, and meaning it. And if he can’t, having enough self-respect to leave that relationship, and the trust in yourself to know you’ll be okay, if not better without him.

I used to think the second half of the gender revolution was going to be about men. I wrote an entire book about it because I genuinely believed that if enough men read the books, went to therapy, and did the work, they’d become better partners for themselves and for the women who love them. That hasn’t happened, at least not on any timeline young women can reasonably build their their around. If anything, I think the rise of masculinity gurus who are red-pill adjacent have created a permission structure where men are encouraged to see themselves as victims of forces they have very little interest in changing. It means con artists like Andrew Tate prey on young men and make them even less suitable partners for the women they’re trying to attract. This is why I’ve come to believe the relentless focus on the male loneliness crisis has done irreparable damage to women’s rights, and to what’s left of intimacy between the sexes.

I think a lot of women are still operating on the assumption that if they just give it enough time, enough patience, enough gentle mothering, the guy will eventually become the man he was supposedly always capable of being. But that’s not an equal partnership, in fact to quote the great philosophers of our time, Melanie on Love Island, "You're playing Build-a-Bear with that bitch, bro."

You cannot nag a man into becoming a partner. Too many women date men like they're rescue dogs, convinced that with enough patience, enough understanding, and enough second chances, he'll eventually stop biting. But the truth is that men will never know that they’re falling behind if women keep building them ramps. The fastest way to make a man grow up is to stop being the reason he doesn't have to.

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Maybe the second half of the gender revolution isn’t about men changing at all. Maybe it’s about women doing the harder, less romantic work of getting explicit about what they need, and being genuinely willing, not performatively willing, to walk away when it’s not there. That means treating financial stability, basic domestic competence, and emotional maturity as non-negotiable minimums, not aspirational qualities you coach someone into over three years of unpaid labor. It means noticing on date four that he doesn’t have a job and hasn’t looked for one, and understanding that this is information, not a redemption arc that’s just waiting to happen. A plant that needs enough water to grow…

And I get it, the hard part, the actually hard part, is the alone part. It’s much easier to be busy mothering a boyfriend than to sit with the discomfort of not having one. Managing a man-child gives young women a role, a sense of purpose, and a story where we feel needed. I get it. I’ve been there.

Being single and getting your needs met through friendships, work, community, and your own resourcefulness doesn’t hit the same. It doesn’t get likes on social media. Your family might not approve. They might whisper after you leave, wondering what’s wrong with you that you’re still single. Loser men in government like JD Vance, will call you an overeducated cat lady. But that’s just because you set yourself free, and they’re jealous that they’re still in jail. Seeing you free reminds them that they’re not. And they hate it. They don’t hate you, they hate themselves. So being single and child-free when you’re a women can feel like failure even when it’s the opposite. But that discomfort is the toll booth on the way to actually having a relationship worth having, instead of a dependent you’ve dressed up as a partner.

And by the way, none of this lets men off the hook. The conditions producing this crisis of male development are real, and someone should absolutely keep writing about them. But women don’t control the economy, the education system, or the culture that raised a generation of men to expect moms instead of partners. Women did not create the loneliness crisis because we are not in power. When women try to do the smallest thing we get told to remember our place, but when it comes to solving men’s gargantuan problems we’re told we are magically all powerful. Which one is it?? Are we powerful or are we not?? Women don't control much. But we do control who we let into our apartments, our bank accounts, our beds, and our lives. We need to start treating those decisions like national security.

Raising the bar has to mean being willing to lose people over it. Otherwise the bar isn't moving. The system doesn't change because women write think pieces about it or men nod along. It changes when enough women refuse to participate in it. You can't make a man become someone else. You can decide whether he gets access to your body, your home, your time, your attention, your peace. That decision is more powerful than we've been taught to believe.

If you enjoyed this article, you can hear more of my thoughts on the topic on this week’s episode of Boy Problems. I dive deeper into why this conversation is especially timely due to some breaking news in my personal life…

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Plus, we flip the "is having a boyfriend embarrassing now" conversation on its head and asks, do we become embarrassing when we have a boyfriend? Grab your journal and alert your group chat, we have a lot to discuss.

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⁠⁠Read the article in The Cut about the mom-ification of gen-z women.⁠⁠

⁠⁠Read Chanté Joseph's article in Vogue, "Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?" ⁠⁠

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Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, international bestselling author, and producer of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media and NBC News. She currently hosts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Boy Problems⁠⁠⁠⁠, a podcast that tackles love, masculinity, dating disasters, and life’s biggest questions.

Women are carefully watching the Lindsay Clancy trial for reasons that have very little to do with true crime. They are watching because it has become a national conversation about the outer edge of postpartum mental illness, and because every new headline raises the same unsettling question: what happens when a mother says she’s not okay? Then, after Hayden Panettiere’s death, millions of people found themselves watching old interviews in which she described what happened after she publicly disclosed that she had postpartum depression, including her account that Neutrogena ended their relationship after she spoke openly about it. One story is about a woman accused of an unimaginable crime, and being failed by a medical system unequipped to handle maternal health. The other is about a woman who described a common medical condition and faced consequences for even mentioning it. They are radically different stories, but they arrive at the same cultural moment carrying an eerily similar message: motherhood remains one of the few experiences where telling the truth about your mental health is dangerous.

That is what made Matt Walsh's claim this week that post-partum depression doesn’t even exist feel less like a hot take than an act of calculated contempt. He argued that a "sizable portion" of postpartum depression isn't hormonal at all, but what happens when selfish women are forced to put someone else's needs before their own. It is a remarkable accusation to level at women whose bodies have spent nine months growing another human being, whose organs have rearranged themselves to sustain that life, who are surviving on fractured sleep while feeding another person with their own bodies, often with less support than mothers have had at any other point in human history. Faced with all of that, Walsh looked at their suffering and concluded the problem wasn't the conditions they were living under, it was their attitude.

Somewhere in the Paleolithic era, long before psychiatry, maternity leave or a man in a suit deciding when a mom should bounce back after growing a whole human, a woman gave birth surrounded by people who had already done it. Other women read her face before she said a word. Someone took the baby while she slept, someone shoved food into her hands before hunger became one more invisible job she had to manage, and someone noticed her hands shaking from exhaustion because there were enough people paying attention for someone to actually notice. She was not expected to recover alone because recovery was never imagined as a solitary thing. A new baby reorganized the entire community, not just one woman’s and her husband if he gets time off work.

Anthropologists call this alloparenting: the reality that human beings evolved to raise children collectively rather than inside isolated nuclear households. It’s easy to treat that as an interesting historical detail, but it’s our biological infrastructure. Human infants require extraordinary amounts of care, and human mothers have always depended on more than one pair of hands to provide it. For most of our history, the village wasn’t optional, it was primordial. It wasn’t just about emotional support, it was about physical safety.

Now imagine dropping that same woman into a third-floor apartment with a newborn, a partner who vanished back to work after a few measly days as though his job were the real emergency, grandparents scattered two time zones away, a few weeks of unpaid leave already bleeding out, and an endless chorus of people telling her to "enjoy every moment," ignoring her exhaustion entirely. She wouldn’t conclude that she had entered a more enlightened civilization. She would probably conclude that she had been abandoned. And yet, men like Matt Walsh argue the problem is the modern woman, even though she's raising children with less communal support than her ancestors ever had, and normalized fathers being optional instead of indispensable.

The abandonment of mothers has become so normalized we think it’s resilience. We celebrate women for doing it all. We applaud their strength. Then, when the predictable consequences of isolation begin to appear, we diagnose the mother instead of the conditions she’s been asked to survive. We assume something is wrong with her rather than asking what kind of society expects one person to do the work that entire communities once shared. And if we’re Matt Walsh we say that her diagnosis isn’t even real, it’s in her head.

While men like Matt Walsh beleive that postpartum depression isn’t real, it’s a serious medical condition, one that can require therapy, medication, hospitalization, or a combination of all three. It is also remarkably common, affecting one in seven mothers, with many more experiencing postpartum anxiety or other perinatal mood disorders. But what receives far less attention is the environment in which that illness unfolds. Sleep deprivation, chronic stress and social isolation isn't incidental. They are the conditions under which millions of women are expected to begin motherhood after we privatized what was once humanity's most collective job. We replaced the village with one exhausted mother, and then we blamed her for collapsing under a weight no human being evolved to carry alone. And this is even worse for non-white women. Black mothers experience postpartum depression at disproportionately high rates, with estimates ranging from 29% to 44%, and yet they are far less likely than white mothers to be diagnosed promptly or receive adequate treatment. And if you think white mothers are afraid to admit to wanting to harm them or their kids, for Black mothers, who risk having their children taken away far more than their white counterparts, asking for help is not even a possibility.

Modern parenting asks one or two adults to perform work that entire communities once shared. We have devalued and privatized care while leaving the expectations attached to care almost untouched. Mothers are still expected to be emotionally available, physically present, professionally ambitious, financially productive, and deeply grateful. This just isn’t sustainable at all. No wonder women are breaking.

The insults made by Walsh and other right-wing political hacks, which are arguments made by this very White House by the way, perform a real function. If postpartum depression can be explained as a character defect that millions of women who have never met each other, just happen to share, then nothing larger has to change. Employers don’t have to offer longer leave. Governments don’t have to use your taxes to make sure mothers have healthcare. Cities don’t have to become places where extended families can afford to live near each other. Fathers don’t have to rethink how care is divided. The problem can remain comfortably contained inside the individual woman. If she failed, then we don't have to admit we did. We have a long history of diagnosing women instead of indicting the world they've been asked to survive. The oldest trick in the book is to call a woman mad so no one has to answer for what was done to her.

And while Matt Walsh obsesses over mothers' character, researchers find that the one thing that predicts post-partum distress is not her personality, it’s whether she has people around her willing to help. Research has found that women with stronger practical and emotional support after birth are significantly less likely to develop postpartum depression, while declining support after childbirth predicts worsening mental health. A large California study found that mothers who consistently received emotional and practical support had about half the rate of postpartum anxiety and depression symptoms compared with mothers who lacked that support. In one prospective study, women with the lowest levels of postnatal social support were nearly ten times more likely to experience postpartum depression than women with the highest levels of support. The science has identified dozens of risk factors for postpartum depression, and shocker, shelfishness isn't one of them.

The timing of the Clancy trial and the renewed attention to Panettiere’s story makes another reality difficult to ignore. Mothers are constantly absorbing lessons about what honesty costs. Clancy’s story raises agonizing questions about whether the health system can support mothers before tragedy occurs, while the other reminds women that publicly acknowledging postpartum depression can carry very serious professional consequences. It isn’t difficult to understand why so many mothers reserve their most frightening thoughts for whispered private conversations with friends rather than institutions, and people who could actually help.

So no this isn’t about women being selfish, it’s about women being burned out and scared to say it. The woman in the Paleolithic was not stronger than the woman standing in her kitchen today with throw-up on her shirt and three hours of sleep behind her. She was simply surrounded by more people. We like to imagine that modern mothers should be able to outperform their ancestors because medicine has advanced and technology has improved, when we’ve just made the job harder than it has ever been. We removed the people who used to share the work, then convinced ourselves that struggling under the weight says something about the woman instead of us.

This is why this week’s headlines weight so heavy on women, especially mothers or those who care about them. Mothers are trying to keep their heads above water, and Matt Walsh's contribution is another hand pushing them under. Mothers haven’t changed and become more self-centered, some men have just become increasingly comfortable asking them to do one of humanity’s oldest collective jobs almost entirely alone. When they falter, we reach for diagnoses, arguments, and moral judgments before we ask the simpler question our ancestors might have recognized immediately: why wasn’t someone there to help?

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If this conversation resonated with you, I think you'll enjoy this week's episode of Boy Problems! I sat down with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the host of Recess Therapy, to talk about what children can teach us about love, friendship, vulnerability, and the emotional honesty so many adults lose along the way. It's funny, unexpectedly moving, and one of my favorite conversations we've had. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Remember to let us know in the comments if you want to join our Patreon book club and help us find an answer to the question: are you allowed to flirt with other people when you’re in a relationship? 

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Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, international bestselling author, and producer of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media and NBC News. She currently hosts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Boy Problems⁠⁠⁠⁠, a podcast that tackles love, masculinity, dating disasters, and life’s biggest questions.

I used to think I was an idiot.

I spent years assuming everyone else was smarter than me, which meant I stayed quiet far more than I should have. I wouldn’t speak up in meetings, I’d hold back at dinner parties, and I’d automatically assume the loudest person in the room probably knew the most. Looking back, that belief shaped a lot more than I realized because it made me confuse confidence with intelligence, in myself and others. I realized I’d spent years trying to seem intelligent when the people I actually admired were doing something completely different. Once I figured it out, I saw it everywhere. The people who stay with you after a conversation usually aren’t the ones with the most impressive facts, or the people who brag about the New Yorker article they read. They’re the ones who make you feel like the world is more interesting than it was an hour ago. They’re paying attention to the world but they’re also paying attention to YOU, they’re asking questions, following tiny tangents, and getting genuinely pumped when they learn something new. That’s a completely different kind of intelligence, a way more enticing form of smarts, and one that’s totally available to us all.

This week's episode of the podcast is all about this. We talk about how to become the kind of person people can't stop talking to, why curiosity is one of the most underrated qualities you can develop, and the simple shifts that can make the rest of your summer feel a whole lot richer. My hope is that instead of watching the season fly by, you end it feeling like you actually lived it.

Summer always feels like the perfect time to wander into new habits. When I was younger I’d accidentally become more interesting every summer without even trying because I was free to explore. I’d wander into bookstores, read random magazines, spend hours outside, overhear conversations, and get bored enough that my brain started making connections on its own. None of it felt productive while it was happening, but somehow I’d come out the other side feeling like my world had expanded.

Now every empty second gets filled before it has a chance to become anything. The second we’re standing in line or sitting alone for thirty seconds, we’ve got our phones out. We’ve gotten so good at avoiding boredom that we’ve accidentally started avoiding one of the biggest drivers of curiosity too.

Before I became a journalist, I worked as a research assistant in LSE’s behavioral science department, and one idea from this field that stuck with me for years i s that we spend so much time trying to become more disciplined and think ourselves into new habits, when it’s usually easier to redesign the environment around us instead. Instead of asking, “How do I become someone who reads more?” ask, “How do I make reading easier than scrolling?” For me it was about moving my library app where tiktok used to be. Or leaving a book on my pillow so that I have to move it if I decide not to read it. Your environment usually wins, whether you like it or not. So make it easier for you to do the things you actually want to do!

So here are four things I'm actually trying this summer to make sure I’m intellectually nourished instead of wasting the summer away scrolling. I'd love to hear yours too!! Leave a comment with something that's made you feel more curious, more engaged with the world, or just more alive lately. One of my favorite parts of this community is how much we all end up learning from each other, so if something has worked for you, share it! Someone else might need to hear it :)

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1. Schedule boredom.

Go for a walk without a podcast. I know, crazy!! Notice how much you notice!! Sit somewhere without immediately pulling your phone out. Let yourself be bored long enough that your brain starts entertaining itself again. Wonder usually shows up a few minutes after discomfort, but most of us never stick around long enough to find out. The more we fill time, the faster time goes by. So when you have resistance over being bored, remember that you are making your summer last longer just by not trying to fill every minute.

2. Quit more books.

I know that sounds terrible, but forcing yourself through books you hate just teaches your brain that learning is miserable. I started reading a book this summer that BUMMED ME OUT. Instead of just giving up on it and choosing another one, I ended up scrolling more. So give up on the idea that finishing a book is necessary!! Give yourself permission not to. The goal isn’t finishing books. It’s reading. So if you’re more likely to read by giving up on a boring book, DO IT.

3. Ask the dumb question.

The best way to become smart is to stop trying to avoid looking dumb. The smartest people I know are constantly admitting they don’t know things. They’re the first people to interrupt someone in the group and say, “Wait, can you explain that?” I LOVE when people do this because most of the time I didn’t get it either! Trying to sound smart is the best way to kill curiosity. Asking questions usually starts the best conversations.

4. Go find something that makes you feel small.

For the very first time in my entire life, I am attempting summer fridays, by working in the morning and then taking the afternoon off to to the beach or spend time in nature. It’s not only improved my wellbeing, it’s improved my productivity! So go look at the ocean, or go to a planetarium, or just stand under some giant trees. If it’s hot, go to a museum they have AC!! The fastest way I’ve found to get out of my own head is remembering how unbelievably big the world. Perspective does something that productivity hacks never will, and sometimes the best way to expand your mind is to remember how much exists outside of it, outside of you.

I think that’s really the whole idea. I don’t want to finish the summer knowing a bunch of random facts I can repeat to people. I’d rather finish it asking better questions than I was asking when it started because every good question makes your world a little bigger than it was before.

If that question about why some people feel so intellectually magnetic made you curious too, we go much deeper into it in this week’s episode. It’s probably one of my favorite conversations we’ve had in a while.

Subscribe if you're not already, because new episodes drop every week! And if you know someone who's currently mourning the end of the summer, send this to them. It might actually help.

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Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, international bestselling author, and producer of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media and NBC News. She currently hosts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Boy Problems⁠⁠⁠⁠, a podcast that tackles love, masculinity, dating disasters, and life’s biggest questions.

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Submit your boy problems ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Check out⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Airplane Mode with Liz Plank⁠⁠⁠⁠ on Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, international bestselling author, and producer of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media and NBC News. She currently hosts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Boy Problems⁠⁠⁠⁠, a podcast that tackles love, masculinity, dating disasters, and life’s biggest questions.