The Daily Whatever Show: Culture

The South Park Guy Just Put the Cornell 7 on Blast

Dana DuBois — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:22:14 GMT

ITHACA, NEW YORK, OR WHEREVER THESE SEVEN DIRTBAG LIVE NOW (The Daily Whatever Press) — I have now been lapped by this unfolding Cornell story three times. I write a piece, the news moves, I write another piece, and the news moves again. I’m a middle-aged woman with a Substack, two kids, and a day job, and I’m doing my best to keep up but SHEESH. The pace of this news is staggering — and I’m so here for all of it.

So if this is your first read, welcome! Now go catch up:

So here’s where we are:

On September 14, Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Cornell.
On September 21, Cornell issued a statement hiding behind federal privacy law.
On September 27, Florence Pugh told the world to “Be angry for us,” and AOC stood up at a town hall in Ithaca and ripped Cornell for letting the accused write essays in private.
On September 28, the DA reopened the criminal case (YES!!!), and the mayor of Ithaca moved to freeze student event permits until Cornell does its homework.

And today, a former South Park writer launched a website: TheCornell7.org.

To which we say: Team Toby Morton—fuck yeah!

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Toby Morton wrote five episodes of South Park between 2001 and 2003, and he voiced Scott Tenorman, the red-headed kid on the receiving end of Cartman’s revenge in the most infamous revenge episode the show ever made. Now 25 years later, he’s finally on the other side of the revenge plot, and this time it’s aimed exactly where it belongs.

The goal is a permanent public record of the case, with the seven men’s names, photos, and employers attached. So it follows them wherever they go, forever.

He says he’s already received names, photographs, documents, and messages. He’s promised billboards “around the country,” and he’s coming for the Cornell administrators he says “failed miserably.” When people reminded him he’s a satirist, not a journalist, he wrote that this makes him “more dangerous,” with “no limits, no boundaries, nobody to tell me I’ve gone too far.”

Good. Fucking good.

Cornell had limits. Cornell had boundaries. Cornell had privacy statutes, twelve hearings, an Office of Civil Rights, a task force, a police department, and a legal team, and it used every one of those boundaries to build a wall around what happened in that house. The DA had limits too, and he used them to call the case “insufficient” and go home. Two years of people with all the boundaries in the world produced an essay as punishment for most of those men. So forgive me if I’m not clutching my pearls because a satirist with a web domain finally showed up to do what the grown-ups wouldn’t.

Morton is the invoice for Cornell’s silence, and Cornell ran up that bill all by itself.

My one ask of Toby is the thing he’s already promised, which is to get every face right, because one wrong photo makes a brand-new victim and could cast doubt on Jane Doe’s case. Beyond that, go, my dude! Build the billboards. Make the website so big it shows up in every background check for the rest of these guys’ lives.

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Now let’s talk about all the other men in the Chi Phi house.

According to the lawsuit, at 1:42 a.m. that night, a fraternity member posted a message to the chapter’s Snapchat group chat, called “Chi Phi Actives.” The message advertised “free pussy” upstairs. She was offered up to a group chat like leftover pizza.

Later that night, one of the brothers wrote back: “Shop still open?”

Shop. Still. Open.

A whole group chat full of “actives” saw that message. But they sure were passive. Not one man in that chat did a goddamn thing. No one called 911. Nobody called campus police, an RA, or her friend. Nobody walked upstairs and said get the fuck out of that room. The most engaged response the lawsuit describes is a guy checking on availability.

Every single man who saw that message and did nothing is culpable.

You don’t get to be the good guy because you read the message and opted not to um, visit the shop. The only viable option here was to speak out and take action, to take steps to stop the atrocity being committed inside your home

And the DA? Van Houten called the messages “disgusting, vulgar,” then said they “had nothing to do with the issue of consent.” Sir. A group chat advertising an incapacitated woman as free is the most on-the-nose piece of consent evidence imaginable. It’s practically a signed confession, a direct indication of how those men dehumanized and violated her.

Better still, the DA told ABC his office never got the Snapchat screenshot. Cornell now says its police department handed a screenshot to the DA back in 2024. One of those two institutions is wrong about the single most important piece of evidence in this case, and both of them are asking us to trust them with the next one.

So subpoena every phone in that chat. Put every “active” in front of that grand jury and make each one of them explain, under oath, what he saw at 1:42am. and why he went back to sleep.

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So is this finally it?

In 2016, Brock Turner got six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman and served three. Chanel Miller’s victim impact statement tore the country open, California changed its sentencing law, and voters recalled the judge. It mattered. And ten years later, an Ivy League school allegedly handed out essay assignments as punishment instead.

That’s the fear under all of this. The internet gets furious, the news cycle crests, and everybody goes home.

But this time, nobody’s going home. The DA is back in the case. A city is choking off the party permits. A lawsuit is going after Cornell’s money. And a guy who has nothing to lose and a whole lot of billboard space is making sure seven names can’t disappear into a transfer application.

So is this finally the story that changes things? It is if we refuse to let it go. Keep posting. Keep calling. Keep sending Toby Morton everything he needs to get it right.

And to the men of Chi Phi Actives, from all of us: the shop is fucking closed.

Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

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Hey Ladies! Your Doctor Is Letting You Get Septic Over a $30 Cream

Dana DuBois — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:09:07 GMT

SEATTLE (The Daily Whatever Press)—Somewhere in America right now, a fifty-eight-year-old woman is telling her doctor she keeps getting UTIs, and her doctor is nodding the way you nod at a coworker's vacation slideshow. Polite. Uninterested. Already thinking about lunch. She'll get antibiotics. She won't get the thing that actually fixes this. And in a small but real number of cases, she will end up in a hospital bed with sepsis, which is what happens when a bladder infection stops being annoying and starts getting deadly.

Here's the part that should ruin your day: this is all preventable. It’s been preventable since 2019, and we’re just choosing not to prevent it.

The receipt: in 2019 the American Urological Association told doctors, in no uncertain terms, to prescribe vaginal estrogen to postmenopausal women with recurrent UTIs. Not as a maybe. As guidance. Menopause drops estrogen, estrogen was doing quiet load-bearing work keeping the vaginal microbiome stocked with protective lactobacilli, lactobacilli leave, E. coli moves into the vacancy like it's got a lease, and now you're getting infections every few months instead of never. Ask me how I know.

Vaginal estrogen — a cream, a ring, an insert, cheap, local, not the same thing as systemic hormone therapy — puts the lactobacilli back. This is not experimental. This is six years old.

And a study using Epic Cosmos data on women over 55 years old with recurrent UTIs found the ones on vaginal estrogen had sepsis rates of 10.6% versus 19.4% for the ones without it, and mortality of 0.42% versus 1.54%. Nearly quadruple the death rate. For skipping a goddamn cream.

So, naturally, only one in four women with recurrent UTIs actually gets a prescription for it.

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.

Why. Why would a six-year-old, evidence-backed, dirt-cheap intervention sit on a shelf while women rack up hospital bills and, in the worst cases, obituaries. Two honest villains, both institutional, both fully aware of what they're doing.

Villain one: primary care and internal medicine, who keep treating menopause like a scheduling inconvenience instead of an organ-system event. The tissue lining your urinary tract is rich in estrogen receptors. It thins, it dries, it stops doing its job — that's not "getting older," that's biology throwing a fixable tantrum, and it deserves a workup, not a shrug and a Z-Pak.

Villain two, and this is the one that actually makes me want to set something on fire: the FDA still slaps a black-box breast-cancer warning on local vaginal estrogen products — a warning built for systemic hormone therapy, the pill-and-patch kind, from a study that never separated out the tiny local dose you put where the problem actually is. Doctors see BLACK BOX, doctors get spooked, doctors under-prescribe a treatment that barely enters the bloodstream, and women pay for that regulatory laziness with their kidneys. An agency whose entire mission is protecting patients is functionally protecting nobody by refusing to update a label. That's not caution. That's malpractice with a government seal on it.

Okay. Here's the part I made up, but I’m certain is still true: somewhere there’s absolutely a pharma exec who looked at "cheap generic cream prevents sepsis" and said, out loud, in a meeting, "where's the margin in that?” I don't have the transcript. I don't need the transcript. You already know the transcript exists in spirit even if I made up the room.

Back to what's real, because above a certain volume of profanity I owe you the facts unvarnished: genitourinary syndrome of menopause affects somewhere between 13% to 87% of women depending which study you trust, which is a genuinely useless range that itself tells you how little anyone's bothered to nail this down. Complicated UTIs cost this country $6 BILLION in 2011 alone. Getting vaginal estrogen actually prescribed could save six to 22 billion a year. This isn't a mystery, people.

Raising two daughters, I think about which system I'm handing them a lot, and I'd like the one where "she's just getting older" isn't a euphemism for "we didn't feel like treating her."

Nobody's coming to fix this for you. Print out the AUA guideline. Hand it to your doctor. Watch what they do with it.

Then judge them accordingly.

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LinkedIn Has Become a Dating App Because Apparently Hinge Was Too Horny

Dana DuBois — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:10:50 GMT

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. Image by author.

SUNNYVALE, CA (The Daily Whatever Press) — A local woman reports she has now been “networked” by three separate men this month, all of whom described her LinkedIn endorsements for “Strategic Thinking” as “kind of hot.”

That’s a joke. Mostly. Yes, I made that woman up, but I didn’t make up the trend, because Zety — yes, the résumé-building website, the people who help you lie about your Excel skills — just surveyed 1,000+ American workers and found that LinkedIn, the site where you frame your life challenges as “key learnings,” has become a place where people go to fall in love, or at least shoot their proverbial shots. One in eight of them actually found love there, which, good for them! 65% of them are ashamed of themselves for even trying. Both things are true at once, and that totes tracks — because shame has never once stopped audacious people from doing anything on the internet.

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My dad spent 40 years in food science. If he wanted to know if a man was legit, he smelled his car. That was his method. Paprika on the floor mats, you’re fine. It was crude, but it worked, because it was actual physical evidence of actual lived experience. LinkedIn has become the paprika car of dating: 48% of respondents said the platform feels more trustworthy than an actual dating profile, because a résumé is harder to fake than a bio that says “6’1, love to laugh, no drama.” Nearly one in five admitted to opening LinkedIn specifically to background-check a potential love interest.

But LinkedInners (may I call them that? Yes, yes I can and did) have opinions on this trend, and they split pretty dramatically on — you guess it — gender. 74% of those surveyed said LinkedIn should stay strictly professional. 26% said pursuing dates on it is “fair game.” And men are more than twice as likely as women to be in that second group — shocking absolutely no woman who has ever opened a message that starts with “hope this isn’t weird” and then shit gets weird immediately.

LinkedIn’s own career expert, Jasmine Escalera, told SFGATE that “the modern workforce doesn’t separate professional and personal identity as neatly as it once did.” I’d like to introduce Jasmine to the 34% of respondents who said a romantic LinkedIn message makes them uncomfortable, and the 19% who just block and report, because apparently a full fifth of the American workforce has decided the correct response to “hey, loved your thoughts on Q3 synergy” is to treat it like a workplace hazard. As they should, gold stars all around. We’ll be sure to note that on your annual review.

Zety, sensing a real opportunity here, is expected to announce a new premium tier any day now — “LinkedIn Premium: Courtship Edition,” $39.99 a month, unlocks the ability to see who read your “About” section three times at 1am. (Also, in case it’s not abundantly clear, this is fabricated. Also somehow completely plausible, which is the actual joke. Thanks folks, I’ll be here all day.)

The generational split is icing on top of the inappropriate use of an app: Gen Z and Millennials are out there vetting dates by LinkedIn at 27% and 33%, respectively. Gen X — my people, the ones who invented “stranger danger” as a personal ethos and still won’t give barista our real names — sits at 19%. Boomers are at 6%, presumably because most of them still think LinkedIn is where you go to accept a job offer? Unclear but also, bravo on the single digit, my Boomer pals. You’ve got this.

I’m not mad that people are lonely. I’m not even mad that a networking site full of humblebrag posts turned out to be a decent background-check tool — guilty as charged, I’ve done this myself more than once. What gets me is that we built a platform to prove we’re employable, and it turned out to be running the whole thing like a Yenta.

Somewhere, a man is updating his headline to “Open to new opportunities” with a knowing nod and a wink. God help us all.

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Florida Mom Says She Had Sex With Her Son "Only About 100 Times," Which Is Not How "Only" Works

Dana DuBois — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:30:31 GMT

ONLY being the key word. Image by author.

LAKELAND, FLORIDA (The Daily Whatever Wire) —Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d read but since I did, now you get to as well: “Your wife told us she’s had sex with her son about 100 times.” But wait, there’s more! The sentence was spoken by a cop, to the father, who was still married to mother of his child. Yeah… you read that right, I’m sorry to say.

This particular horror came out of an investigation in Lakeland, Florida, after 46-year-old Christina Clemens called authorities to report that her 22-year-old son, Shane Clemens, had struck her during a domestic dispute. Deputies arrested Shane on a domestic violence battery charge, which would already have been a pretty bad evening for everyone involved.

Then Shane apparently decided: hold my beer, mom. If he was going down, he was taking the family secrets with him.

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According to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, Shane told investigators that he and his mother had been having a sexual relationship since he turned 18. Investigators asked him to repeat the allegation, which he did. They then asked Christina whether she had been having sex with her son, and I just vomited in my mouth typing that phrase.

Then this is where the story takes a turn that would be difficult to write if the actual words weren’t sitting right there in the sheriff’s account.

Christina reportedly said they’d done it “only about 100 times.”

I need us to sit with the word only for a minute. Because I don’t think she should’ve had access to only in that moment.

Only about 100 times.

I can use “only” when I’m telling you how many slices of pizza I ate before realizing I’d eaten an entire pizza. I can use it when I’m explaining that I only spent $200 at Target because I went in for shampoo and somehow came out with a seasonal wreath, three sweaters, and a small appliance I don’t remember putting in the cart.

“Only about 100 times” is not an appropriate use of only.

No version of this sentence exists with 100 as a reassuring number.

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According to investigators, Shane said the sexual relationship began after he turned 18. The two didn’t live together during his childhood, and the sheriff’s office says they reconnected when he was an adult. Shane reportedly told investigators that the relationship continued for years, and the affidavit describes an ongoing sexual relationship inside the home he shared with his mother and her husband.

Which brings us to the husband.

Because, folks, this story has a husband.

Yes, Christina is married, and investigators apparently had to go talk to her husband and ask whether he knew that his wife was allegedly having sex with her son. He said no. He told them he and Christina were happily married.

He did, however, have one little detail that suddenly becomes much more significant in retrospect: he told investigators that he had been suspicious because Christina and Shane would go into the master bedroom together and lock the door.

Sir.

I don’t know what you thought was happening in there, but I would like to gently suggest that “my wife and her adult son are repeatedly locking themselves in our master bedroom together” belongs on a very short list of household circumstances that deserve a follow-up question.

According to Sheriff Judd, that’s what the husband told investigators. He hadn’t known about the alleged sexual relationship, but he had noticed the locked-door situation.

And now I’m stuck thinking about the phrase “happily married,” because there are few situations in which those two words are followed by a police interview about your wife’s alleged sexual relationship with her son.

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But mostly, I keep coming back to that word “only.”

Because “only about 100 times” is the kind of phrase that makes you wonder what the other options were.

“Only” 50 times? Still horrifying.

“Only” 10 times? Still incest.

“Only” once? Also incest, Christina.

Now excuse me while I go bleach my eyeballs and hell, my entire brain, to disinfect after reading and writing about this horror story.

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What She’s Learned About Grift

Dana DuBois — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:36:57 GMT

Photo by Gage Skidmore on Wikipedia.

NEW YORK (The Daily Whatever Wire) — Anyone else been dreading this day for a year, the one-year anniversary of the murder of Charlie Kirk? I’ve felt bile in my gut just contemplating the speeches, the dedications, the balls-to-the-wall vigil energy for a man who unquestionably spent his rare and precious (and in the end, very short) life doing harm — to women, to minorities, to immigrants, to queer people, to anyone who wasn’t a white straight Christian dude with a gun fetish, like him. He road-showed his hate speech across college campuses and argued, among many other awful things, that, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

Was it worth it though, Charlie?

I suspect your widowed wife and your nonprofit, Turning Point USA, might say it was.

Erika Kirk and her kids watched as Charlie got shot and killed doing what he loved—championing guns, demeaning minorities—one year ago today. And this week, she published a New York Times essay called “What I Learned About Grief.” Boo fucking hoo, Erika. Call it “grief” or whatever you want — I’m calling it an opportunistic woman telling other women to submit while she herself assumes power to run an $85 million nonprofit in the wake of her husband’s death. I’m so fucking done pretending this is a grief essay and not a business plan with a calla lily taped over the logo.

Let’s start with the timeline she left out of her own essay. Four days, four days after her husband had his neck blown off in front of their children, Erika Kirk sent a fundraising email. Not a request for privacy. Not a moment of silence. An email, with a call to action: “I refuse to let the movement Charlie built die. It will only grow — stronger, bolder, louder. Join me.” She wasn’t waiting for a title. She was already running the place. But she did get that title — just eight days after Charlie’s death, on September 18, in a unanimous vote, after she’d already told staff she wanted to “10x the organization.”

Here are some numbers that might make your head explode (sorry, too soon??): within four days the shooting, Turning Point logged 37,000 inquiries from people wanting to start new campus chapters. Before the shooting, the organization had 900 official college chapters and roughly 1,200 high school chapters — 2,100 total. Against that base, 37,000 new requests is a 1,762% surge, 17 times over, and Turning Point’s own spokesman used those exact numbers to brag about it on X within days. Grief doesn’t come with a growth rate. A franchise rollout does.

Lynn Friess, widow of the donor who wrote Turning Point’s first check back in 2012 for $10,000, pledged $1 million — 100 times that original bet — before the funeral was even planned. Instagram handed Charlie’s account 3.5 million new followers postmortem, a bump you get from a true-crime docuseries, not from losing a husband. Turning Point closed out 2024 at $85 million in revenue, up 142% over five years, and I would bet every dollar I don’t have that the anniversary numbers blow that out of the water.

But what really makes my blood boil? It’s not the money, but the message the funds propagates. Erika Kirk and Turning Point spends every single day telling other women their highest calling is submission and domesticity, that a wife’s job is to stay home, defer, support, and disappear into the marriage so her husband can shine. Meanwhile Erika Kirk left her own small children — the same ones who watched their father bleed out onstage— to crisscross this country running a multibillion-dollar operation, giving speeches, closing donor deals, building her own personal brand on top of his corpse. She’s not staying home with the kids. She’s not deferring to anyone. She’s the boss, and she wants all other women, women without a security detail or a multimillion dollar entity behind them, to give up exactly the kind of power and autonomy she herself refuses to put down for one single day, even the day after her husband’s murder.

That’s the grift. Not the fundraising emails, though God, those are gross too.

The real grift is asking millions of women to hand over their agency in the name of a “sacred” domestic order that the woman selling it has never once lived inside herself.

Reviewing Erika’s New York Times essay, I had to scoff at the attribution. The essay bio opens with “Mrs. Kirk is the widow of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA.” But in the closing bio, it reads, “Erika Kirk is the chief executive of Turning Point USA.” Both statements are true, of course: same woman, same words, two job titles. But not one editor at that paper made her pick one. Grief gets the sympathy. CEO gets the revenue. She doesn’t have to choose, and apparently neither does the New York Times Opinions desk. And that’s exactly the sleight of hand this entire essay is about.

Erika writes that grief “doesn’t care whom you voted for,” in the same essay where she calls her husband’s murder his “assignment,” fulfilled, like God handed him a hate-speech worksheet that said “spew vitriol about how women, immigrants, minorities, and queer people are the problem, fight with some college kids, and then die for it on camera,” and he turned it in early for extra credit.

She writes that she’s not angry at God. Here we’re aligned; I believe her. I think she’s too busy closing the quarter with immense profits to be angry at anyone.

Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to get shot. Full stop, no asterisk, and every ounce of me wishes we had sensible gun laws that would have served as protection between that man and a rifle, even though I loathe everything he stood for. Even though he said — his words, not mine, and so many people got canceled online for quoting Kirk back to Kirk supporters after he died, but whatever — that some gun deaths were “a prudent deal” for keeping his beloved Second Amendment. I don’t think it’s prudent. I’d like to think he wouldn’t anymore, either. I watched the video of his murder many times that day, searching his face in those final seconds before the light went out. In my mind, he lived an eternity in those liminal seconds where he saw the harm done by his words, and fully grasped the irony of his undoing. I don’t have empathy for him. Just curiosity. I am sorry for how he passed, even as I see the cruel beauty in it. No one should die that way.

I can want him alive and still refuse to admire what his widow built out of his death. The New York Times op-ed desk ran a thousand words as if the second half of that sentence doesn’t exist.

Erika Kirk didn’t learn grief this year. She learned exactly how much a country will pay a woman to preach submission while she personally practices none of it, and she is never, ever going to stop cashing that check.

A prudent deal, you might say, if you were her husband.

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BREAKING NEWS: Phoebe Bridgers Has Leg Hair

Dana DuBois — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:41:39 GMT

Photo by Martin Schumann / Wikipedia

VENICE, ITALY (The Daily Whatever Wire)—Clutch your pearls, people, for I have unbelievably big news: Phoebe Bridgers is a mammal. I know, I know, this is a lot to process, so let’s go slow. Mammals are a class of animal characterized by, among other things, mammary glands, warm blood, and hair. Not “hair, sometimes, if she’s feeling brave and forgot to pack her razor, or to book an appointment with her aesthetician.” Hair, structurally, as a defining trait of the taxonomic class. Class Mammalia. You were taught this in fourth grade, right before the substitute teacher gave up and put on a filmstrip.

So when Phoebe Bridgers stood on a boat in Venice on September 5 wearing a Gucci skirt suit, and her legs—which are, again, mammalian legs, attached to a mammalian body—had hair on them, the correct scientific classification of that event is “Completely Normal.”

What actually happened is that 18 photographers and at least one entertainment outlet encountered a baseline biological fact and treated it like a cryptid sighting. Somewhere a field researcher is standing very still with binoculars, whispering “we’ve got a visual, she’s fully coated, repeat, fully coated,” and getting a byline for it.

Here’s the part that should actually make you furious, and it’s not the leg, it’s the timing. Bridgers was in Venice for the premiere of Primetime, an A24 film where Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen—the guy who built a television franchise out of catching people exposed and broadcasting it as journalism. That’s the movie. That’s the joke it’s already in on. And less than 24 hours after the photo call, the coverage ran the exact same play on the woman standing next to him, minus the hidden camera and plus a macro lens. You can’t release a film about the ethics of gotcha exposure and then let your own red carpet become a live nature documentary about your lead actress’s shins.

David Attenborough would not stand for this. David Attenborough has seen a lion eat a wildebeest with more editorial restraint.

A new study I just conducted, methodology, alone and staring very, very hard at my laptop, finds that four out of five entertainment photographers can identify an unshaven mammalian calf from 30 yards in low light but can not, at gunpoint, tell you a single line of dialogue from the movie their subject flew to Italy to promote. Somewhere a man who’s never once audited his own follicular output is typing “just gross” under a photo of a fellow mammal existing as mammals do, and he will finish his coffee having no idea he just became the funniest part of somebody else’s article.

Not to split hairs (haha, I’ll be here all night, folks), but not every woman has hair on her legs, and that’s also just also biology. Alopecia, for example, means no body hair, no matter what gender the body. Bodies do what they do, and none of it is anyone’s business either way. The point is that hair, presence or absence, was the least interesting thing about the exquisitely talented Phoebe Bridgers, and likely the very least interesting thing about the Venice Film Festival, in progress on that dock. But here we are.

And we’ve been here before. Julia Roberts waved an unshaven armpit at a London premiere in 1999 and spent the next two-and-a-half decades explaining it was a wardrobe issue, not a political statement—and that’s a helluva thing to still be clarifying in her 50s. That’s 27 years of nature documentaries about women’s arms, and the species covering it hasn’t evolved a single new instinct.

I raised two daughters watching this machine run in real time, and I can tell you exactly what it teaches a 16-year-old when she sees her favorite musician denigrated for having leg hair: your body is a headline before it’s yours, and people are going to judge you mercilessly if you don’t conform to beauty standards, no matter how great your accomplishments.

Nah, I’m just fucking with you. My daughter gives exactly zero fucks about this story, or shaving. And we’ve got amazing seats to go see Phoebe Bridgers on her (very sold out) tour and we can’t wait. So suck it, patriarchal beauty standards!

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Thirteen Men Walk Into a Rape Trial. Her Husband Sent the Invitations.

Dana DuBois — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 18:01:04 GMT

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND (ENGLAND 🎵) (The Daily Whatever Wire) — I told you. Back in April, I fucking told you. For those who can’t remember the horror of five months ago, I’m sad to say I’m the feminist killjoy who’s gonna jog your memory. The story was the so-called Online Rape Academy: men drugging their wives and girlfriends, raping them while they were unconscious, filming it, and uploading the videos to a porn site with hashtags like #sleepporn and #eyecheck. They built a little community around it. They traded tips. They watched each other’s videos. They cheered each other on.

And they say men are lonely!

Not lonely enough.

The website got shut down, then turned on again, and now appears to be down again. But we knew. We fucking knew. When none of the men involved faced meaningful consequences, the lesson wasn’t “don’t do this.” The lesson was “you can get away with this.”

The only questions were when and where.

The answer, apparently, is now. In Manchester, England

Here are the (utterly horrifying) deets: according to CNN World, beginning in 2004, a man in his 60s allegedly drugged his wife and raped her while she was unconscious. For years. In her own home. In her own bed. She had no idea what was happening to her body.

Prosecutors also allege that, beginning in 2018, he started involving other men. He allegedly invited them into the house to rape her while she was unconscious.

Thirteen men said yes. Allegedly.

The husband has pleaded guilty to 15 counts — including five rapes, six counts of assault by penetration, three sexual assaults, and one count of sharing intimate images of his wife without her consent — while contesting 33 others.

Keith Fotheringham, 59, has already pleaded guilty to four offenses, including conspiracy to rape and conspiracy to administer a substance to incapacitate her. The remaining 12 men, aged 28 to 73, deny all charges.

So a jury of five men and seven women is now being asked to sit through 15 weeks of testimony about what these men allegedly did to an unconscious woman. Fifteen weeks.

Imagine needing 15 weeks to explain how a woman got raped.

The story is being compared to Gisèle Pelicot’s case in France because the architecture is horrifyingly familiar: a husband as procurer, a wife who did not know, and a succession of men willing to treat an unconscious woman’s body as an invitation.

Different country. Different men. Same fucking blueprint.

These are not men who arrived wearing villain costumes. One is a senior paramedic. He was photographed shaking Prince Harry’s hand in 2011 after helping during the Manchester riots. Another is a former football club chief executive. Another used to coach an under-16s football team. These are the jobs we associate with trust.

Sounds like some of these so-called trustworthy men looked at an unconscious naked woman and said, sure, count me in.

That’s the terrifying part.

And that makes me want to destroy all men.

I mean, not really. I have children and a mortgage, and am fond of many men in my life. But spiritually? When I hear stories like this one, I would very much like to hurl the entire gender into the sea.

Instead, allow me to introduce the imaginary crisis-PR firm I have invented in my rage: Reputation Salvage LLC., specializing in men accused of doing horrific things who were previously considered perfectly respectable human beings.

Our entire pitch deck is one slide: HE SEEMED NORMAL.

The details can rotate: He coached children’s football! He worked in emergency services! He was a respected professional! He was always polite to the neighbors! He had a job! He had friends! He had a reputation!

He seemed normal. Of course he seemed normal.

That’s how “he seemed normal” works.

The man who allegedly drugged his wife and raped her for years didn’t walk around wearing a sash that said I RAPED MY WIFE. The men prosecutors say he invited into his home did not arrive carrying tote bags that said HELLO, I AM HERE TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT AN UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN.

They looked like normal men.

That’s not a defense. It’s the fucking problem.

“He seemed normal” has been clocking unpaid overtime as a defense since before I was born. We use it to make ourselves feel better about the people we failed to see clearly. If he seemed normal, then perhaps there was no warning, so nobody could have known. If nobody could have known, then perhaps this is just one of those terrible things that happens, blameless.

Except it isn’t. It’s a series of choices.

A husband allegedly drugs his wife. He rapes her. He films her. He shares the images. He invites other men into the house. Those men allegedly see an unconscious woman and choose to participate. One choice after another after another.

Back in April I said these men don’t fall out of the sky. They’re the loud version of the guy in your comments explaining that you’re overreacting, that the data is more nuanced than you think, that you should really look at the methodology before you get so upset.

Manchester is what happens when that culture stops being theoretical.

You take a man who believes a woman’s consent is something he can circumvent. You give him access to an unconscious woman. You add a husband willing to drug her. You add men willing to accept the invitation.

Add a paramedic. Add a coach. Add eleven more. You don’t get an aberration. You get a roster.

And then everyone acts surprised.

I’m done being surprised.

May they prosecute the living fuck out of every one of those men.

Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

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Boys Are Finally Getting Their Own Beauty Culture. It Smells Like Piss.

Dana DuBois — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:02:24 GMT

Photo by Adrian “Rosco” Stef on Unsplash. Image by author.

STUFF OF YOUR NIGHTMARES, USA (The Daily Whatever Wire) — Buckle the fuck up, buckos, because we have found the coming-of-age horror even worse than looksmaxxing, now in full scent-o-vision!

It’s called pheromone-maxxing, and the TL;DR premise is that if a teenage boy stops showering, stops using deodorant, and lets four days of body odor marinate into his shirt, women will be biologically compelled to want his fetid bod. They’re trying to become biologically irresistible by becoming fucking rank.

Some of the more committed disciples are drinking their own urine to “sweat out toxins,” which is not a joke I invented — that’s the actual reporting, and I have read it three times hoping it would resolve into satire on its own. It did not. Reality got there first, wearing yesterday’s undershirt with yellow stains dribbled down the front.

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Boys, boys, boys… noooooo! My god justust, no. No girl is going to be aroused by this shit-show — excuse me, urine-show.

Let’s be honest about the lineage here, because it’s not subtle. This is looksmaxxing’s ugly cousin — the same movement that already has boys taking calipers to their own jawlines and, in the truly deranged corners, taking hammers to their faces to “mew” their way into a sharper bone structure. Looksmaxxing was boys absorbing thirty years of women’s magazine psychosis — measure yourself, rank yourself, optimize yourself into someone worth loving — and running it through a bro filter. Pheromone-maxxing is the inevitable next stage: they got tired of optimizing toward beauty, so now they’re optimizing toward disgusting, and calling it authenticity. Congratulations, boys. You didn’t escape the beauty-industrial complex. You just opened a satellite office in the sewer.

Here’s your topper, and it’s a beauty: the “pheromones” in question have never been confirmed to exist in humans. Not “the jury’s out.” Not “emerging science.” Sixty-plus years of researchers chasing one candidate compound in male sweat, and the most recent review, from 2025, landed on the word “inconclusive” — which we believe is science-speak for “we’ve got nothing, please stop drinking your own piss over this.” These kids aren’t optimizing a known biological lever. They’re doing performance art for a hormone that might be fictional, the way Bigfoot or Bloody Mary might be real if you squint at a blurry photo or bathroom mirror hard enough and want it badly enough.

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And who, you ask, benefits from scads of teenage boys deciding hygiene is for cowards? Content moderation, that’s who. Sex educators have pointed out that as platforms crack down on explicit content, creators — plenty of them sex workers trying to survive an algorithm that flags a bra strap but waves through an armpit — pivoted the erotic charge to whatever body part hasn’t gotten the ban hammer yet. Underarms. Sweat. The word “musk,” deployed with a straight face. It’s selling sex without all the get-you-banned bits. And somewhere in a boardroom right now, a pheromone cologne brand is drafting a marketing plan that begins with the sentence “What if smelling bad, but on purpose, but also for $78?”

One imagines the FAQ page already live: “Q: Will this actually make me more attractive? A: Science says probably not, but have you tried simply believing harder?” I’d like to think that’s a joke. At this satire level, I’m allowed to invent it, and I’m only about 32.8% sure it isn’t already real.

Meanwhile, actual doctors are going on TikTok to say, out loud, to cameras, “There is no scientific basis for pheromone-maxxing” — a sentence physicians should not have to say about basic bathing, a sentence my grandmother would have found insulting to issue to a golden retriever, let alone a teenage boy.

So here’s where the joke runs out for me, personally, as someone raising two daughters into whatever’s left of the dating pool: I don’t get to laugh this one all the way off. Somewhere out there, right now, a 17-year-old boy is skipping his shower with total confidence, certain he’s found the cheat code to being sexually desired, when the actual cheat code was always just soap, honesty, and not being disgusting on purpose.

My girls didn’t sign up to inherit that math. Nobody asked them.

The trend will pass, the way trends do. I’d just like it on the record that we saw exactly what it was while it happened, and we said so.

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Hey GenX: The Job Market Hates You. Have You Tried Journaling?

Dana DuBois — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:49:18 GMT

Well, have you?? Photo by Ellen Borowiak on Unsplash. Image by author.

UNITED KINGDOM (The Daily Whatever Wire)—Buckle up, buttercups: The Independent just dropped another article about GenX and our work prospects this week, and buried under four paragraphs of actual data is a life coach telling you to breathe for 60 seconds like that’s going to un-fuck a labor market that already decided you’re expired. So, yay?

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The article starts as a plucky little tale, but quickly pivots to some downright startling numbers: 71.6% employment for people 50–64 in the UK. Lose your job after 50 and you’re twice as likely to still be unemployed a year later — not because you got worse at your job, but because some hiring algorithm clocked your graduation year and filed you under does-not-compute. 25% of women over 40 have disappeared from the workforce entirely, mostly due to caregiving (kids, elders, probably husbands), health issues (hi, peri), and stalled progression (huh, wonder what might cause that?). And about half the women 40–55 years old call themselves professionally “stuck.” And these are the people who want to be — or at least, have to be — working.

The article even gives the trap a name: too old to be hired, too young to retire. Which, sure, we see no lies there. It’s just a bit exasperating it took a career journalist to say in nine words what the rest of us have been muttering into our mugs for over a decade.

We’re the sandwich generation on top of it — caregiving for elderly parents and kids at the same time, learning new software while worrying whether our retirement funds can cover the mortgage. That’s if we have savings at all. Aside to The Independent from the other side of the pond: your pensions, however inadequate, are looking pretty damn tasty to the U.S.-based “sandwich generation” 50-somethings. Turns out, 40% of GenXers in the U.S. have no retirement savings at all. That’s a structural squeeze, a crisis waiting to crash and burn, and it’s worth an entire article on its own.

But nope, The Independent has a fix for us. Pause. Reflect. Organize. Journal your five values. Network with your outer circle. Breathe. I’m sorry — breathe? You want me to box-breathe my way past an AI résumé screener that nukes anyone whose career history begins in the last millennium? That’s not a coping strategy, that’s a hostage negotiation. Because yes, I know I can update my résumé to only show my past 10–15 years of work experience. But what I can’t do is update my face to look like I’m 32 years old, should I get past the bots and into an actual interview.

Here’s the part that should make you furious instead of zen: the article spends four whole paragraphs proving your cortisol is correct — your brain narrows under stress, you can’t strategize from fight-or-flight, fine, real neuroscience, no notes — and then it pulls a full bait-and-switch. Because your stress isn’t a malfunction. It’s your nervous system doing math faster than you can, and getting the same answer the algorithm got: you’re not wanted here. Calling that a brain glitch and handing you a breathing app is just gaslighting with a footnote.

And can we talk about who’s selling this? She’s got 25 years running the desk at a major glossy. A book deal. Enough of a financial airbag to leave the masthead and open a coaching practice that runs paid retreats. I mean, she got The Independent to write about her work. Good for her, genuinely — but that woman didn’t reinvent herself on vibes and journaling. She reinvented herself on 25 years of institutional cushion, and she’s selling you the cushion’s absence as a personality flaw you can fix with a worksheet.

Commence eyerolls here.

Meanwhile, the actual person in that ONS data has a mortgage priced for a job that got automated in March, a kid starting college in the fall, and a parent who needs a ride to dialysis three days a week. You want to hand that woman five values to journal about? My teenagers disclose more information about where they’ll be Friday night than this article discloses about who benefits from you thinking this is a mindset problem.

Because that’s the con, and it is a con: name the systemic problem loud enough to sound credible, then sell the individual fix quiet enough that nobody notices the actual system — the one running the screeners, writing the age-coded rejection emails, calling 50 “too experienced” — walks out untouched, whistling, cashing checks. Dating coaches do this. Wellness influencers do this. Now the reinvention-industrial complex does it too, in a blazer, at a retreat, for $3,000 a weekend.

None of the tactical advice is garbage, to be clear. Learn to speak fluent robot to the screener — quantify your wins, mirror the job posting’s language, so the AI at least has to work to reject you. Rebuild the LinkedIn. Call the person on the edge of your contacts instead of the same five friends. Keep all of it. What I won’t let stand is “pause, reflect, organize” doing the job that the sentence “this is discrimination and it has a name” was supposed to do and conveniently didn’t.

Because here’s what would actually move that 71.6%, and none of it requires a single GenXer to journal about anything: hiring systems that don’t auto-reject a graduation year like it’s spam. Employers who treat 50 as an experienced asset instead of the exit interview. Training budgets that include the people who’d actually get something out of them, instead of routing every dollar to whoever just walked in the door. Pay transparency, so the “risk” employers claim to see in a 50-year-old candidate has to survive contact with an actual number. That’s a policy conversation. It just doesn’t fit in a book, and it sure as hell doesn’t sell a retreat.

We’re a generation that will absorb literally anything and call it a personal growth opportunity. We did it to burnout. We’re doing it to menopause. We are now doing it to a hiring system that ran the numbers on replacing us with someone 28 and cheaper, and is currently winning — like somewhere a 26-year-old is playing “Loser” unironically while our résumés get filtered by a bot that’s younger than the chorus.

So journal your five values if it gets you to sleep. I’m not going to stop you.

Just don’t you dare mistake the worksheet for the fight — or the justified indignation.

The 71.6% was never ours to fix alone.

Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

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TDWS: Effed-up Friday with Karen Attiah & Nicole Walters

Dana DuBois — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:01:19 GMT

I love playing matchmaker, and Friday’s Live may be the best pairing I’ve made yet: and , two of the smartest, most fearless women I know, meeting for the first time, and on my birthday eve, no less. Two Leos and a Scorpio, taking the mics and taking charge. Anything could’ve happened.

What happened was an hour about what it costs to refuse to shrink.

Karen walked us through where things stand with The Washington Post: she was fired in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, after commenting on the political discourse around his death on Blue Sky. The Post’s argument was that she’d endangered her colleagues. The record says otherwise — the threats the Post cited were directed at her, not at anyone else at the paper, and still the institution moved to protect itself rather than her.

She named the pattern plainly: this is the same paper that suspended Felicia Sonmez for factually reporting Kobe Bryant’s rape case the day he died. Punish the woman who won’t perform grief on command for a man credibly accused of harm.

Then there’s her book. Karen was the editor who hired Jamal Khashoggi — worked with him for a year before he was murdered in Istanbul by Saudi agents. She’d finished a manuscript about that year with him, close to the finish line, when the Post quietly stopped the editing process. Three years later, she still doesn’t know why. Now, watching the paper scrub Jamal’s name from its own history at the same time it’s trying to write her out of hers, she’s treating the book as an obligation rather than a project — her word was spiritual. She’s finishing it no matter what happens with the arbitration.

The entire chat blew up with future readers.

Nicole’s through-line was permission, specifically women’s refusal to keep asking for it. She told the story of how she first landed on my radar: the week Andrew Tate hit number one on Substack’s bestseller list to widespread outrage, and Nicole unseated him. Her point wasn’t the ranking. It was what she said when I asked her and Karen why neither of them had a thousand invitations already sitting in their inbox: because we have to work ten times harder for the attention any mediocre white man gets for doing less.

RELATABLE.

Put next to each other, their stories weren’t really about journalism and entrepreneurship as separate lanes. They were the same fight in two rooms: institutions — a newsroom, an industry, your own inner critic — will ask women to make themselves smaller in exchange for safety, and the safety is usually fake anyway. Karen’s fighting that fight in arbitration. Nicole’s fighting it every time she tells a client to send that invoice. Neither one is interested in shrinking to make it easier on anyone else.

If you’re not already subscribed to these women, do not pass go or collect $200. Just got subscribe—and if you can, pay for it. Independent journalism doesn’t run on goodwill.

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Nieta Greene on "Crip Crow" | The Daily Whatever Show

The Daily Whatever Show — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:02:58 GMT

Huge thanks to for joining us for Disability Pride Month!

Keep up with her work at Say No To Crip Crow and here:

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The Daily Whatever Show: Exploring Our Jewishness

The Daily Whatever Show — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:45:31 GMT

We interrupted this Summer Vacation in progress to bring you some important commentary from two reluctant Jews.

Here are the essays we discussed:

Lawrence Winnerman

Zionist

by Lawrence Winnerman…

3 months ago · 168 likes · 71 comments · Lawrence Winnerman

Lawrence Winnerman

The Yobitsugi Plan: A Palestine & Israel Confederation

by Lawrence Winnerman…

3 months ago · 42 likes · 5 comments · Lawrence Winnerman

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

An Ambivalent Jew Returns to Germany for Taylor Swift

Listen to the podcast…

3 months ago · 87 likes · 24 comments · Dana DuBois

We’d welcome your productive comments/feedback on anything else shared in this video.

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TDWS: Feminist Killjoys, Reporting for Duty

Dana DuBois — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:18:34 GMT

Fine Feminist Hour brought together two of my favorite feminist voices on Substack: Zulfina of and of Bitchy History.

What started as a conversation about feminism in 2026 quickly expanded into a discussion about patriarchy, gender studies, reproductive rights, media representation, online misogyny, and why the word feminist still makes some people so uncomfortable. We talked about everything from medical dramas and abortion storylines to the persistence of gender-based violence and the ways anti-feminist movements are repackaging old ideas in new language.

Mostly, though, this was a conversation about refusing to surrender the word feminism—or the fight for a more equitable world. Today’s show was smart, funny, thought-provoking, and exactly the kind of discussion I wish more people were having.

Please go support these brilliant creators—and go buy an amazing t-shirt or two from Meredith’s Teepublic shop. They even come in women’s cut styles!

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The Daily Whatever Show: Dana, Dana, Dana! (And Lawrence)

The Daily Whatever Show — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:13:27 GMT

We had a wonderful time chatting with and , two amazing writers who we met during our show back in May—so yes, this is all Jane’s fault. And we couldn’t be happier about it!

Have a listen, and be sure to subscribe to these two.

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The Daily Whatever Show: What We're Working On AMA

The Daily Whatever Show — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:29:07 GMT

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TDWS: Fine Feminist Hour with Julie Roginsky

The Daily Whatever Show — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:33:36 GMT

Our friend returned to for Fine Feminist Hour for a powerful and deeply personal conversation about the hidden costs of workplace silencing. Drawing from her own experiences at Fox News and in politics, Julie shared how nondisclosure agreements can prevent survivors and witnesses from speaking openly about harassment, assault, and retaliation.

We talked about the origins of Lift Our Voices, the nonprofit she co-founded with Gretchen Carlson to end the use of NDAs and forced arbitration in cases of workplace misconduct. Along the way, Julie reflected on power, accountability, feminism, and the long road toward meaningful change.

Be especially sure to check out their new LOV AI tool, a “first of its kind contract reader that lets you know if you’re being silenced at work.” Finally, an AI tool that’s unquestionably doing more good than harm.

The show was, in a word, incredible, and equal parts infuriating, illuminating, and inspiring—a reminder that progress often begins when someone decides the truth is worth fighting for.

Here are some of the unsung women heroes Julie mentioned during the broadcast:

Ifeoma Ozoma: Spearheaded the California Silenced No More Act
Katie Brennan: NJ survivor who inspired the federal Speak Out Act
Zelda Perkins: Weinstein survivor who founded Can’t Buy My Silence and passed the NDA ban in the UK

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The Daily Whatever Show Celebrates Rosie the Resister

Lawrence Winnerman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:48:29 GMT

Rosie Wheeler—better known to many of us as —joined TDWS for what will likely be her final public conversation. She’s terminally ill, and reached out to ask if she could come on our show one last time, to say goodbye.

Of course, we said yes.

And somehow, despite the sadness hanging over the occasion, what emerged was a remarkably beautiful hour.

We talked about journalism, resistance, billionaires, Christian nationalism, and the unfinished work of protecting democracy. But the conversation kept returning to something deeper: Rosie shared stories about her children and grandchildren, her final Mother’s Day, the letters she’s writing for her family, and the strange gift of having the chance to say goodbye.

She showed us how to face the end of a life with honesty and grace.

And most of all, she reminded us that the work continues—that the torch gets passed, not dropped.

It was an extraordinary act of generosity from a remarkable woman. We love you, Rosie, and we’re so honored to have had this hour with you. We promise the torch is safe with us.

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The Daily Whatever Show: Our Summer Vacation AUA (Ask Us Anything)

The Daily Whatever Show — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:06:50 GMT

The Daily Whatever Show spent the morning talking about summer vacation—not as an ending, but as a deliberate pause.

After fifteen months of broadcasting five days a week, Lawrence and I shared our decision to shift into summer mode, with Effed-up Friday continuing while the rest of the schedule takes a seasonal break. The conversation wasn’t really about taking time off. It was about making room for what’s next.

The most moving part of the conversation centered on tomorrow’s guest, , who’s terminally ill and asked to join us for what may be her final public conversation. It was a reminder that community matters, that our time is finite, and that sometimes the most important thing we can do is show up for one another while we can.

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Saturdays for Sanity

The Daily Whatever Show — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:24:09 GMT

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You Cannot Build Community by Starving the Creators

Dana DuBois — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:02:18 GMT

joined and within about five minutes had both and me openly questioning every self-sacrificing creative instinct we’ve carried since GenX childhood.

What started as a conversation about Nicole dethroning Andrew Tate on the Substack bestseller list quickly became something much bigger: reinvention, corporate burnout, creator economics, side hustles, money trauma, patriarchy, and why so many smart, talented people — especially women — have been conditioned to undervalue their own work.

Nicole told the story of realizing, while working inside corporate America, that no amount of hard work was ever going to put her on the same playing field as the men at the top. So she quietly built her own business on the side, quit during a Periscope live (remember Periscope??) so she couldn’t back out, and became a millionaire within months by applying the exact same business skills she’d been using to enrich someone else’s company.

But the emotional center of the conversation landed somewhere else entirely.

We started talking about creative labor. About building community-driven work out of love while quietly starving the people creating it. About the strange shame many GenX creatives still carry around asking to be paid. About how many of us were taught that monetization somehow contaminates authenticity.

And then Nicole basically staged an intervention live on air for Lawrence and me.

She pointed out that TDWS has spent a year building community, relationships, emotional support, conversation, consistency, visibility, and connection because both of us have been operating from this deeply ingrained belief that asking directly for financial support somehow makes the work less pure.

Watching the audience immediately respond in the comments — literally typing “yes” and “1” over and over when Nicole asked whether they’d support the show financially — genuinely cracked something open in both of us. Not because it suddenly became “about money,” but because it reframed support itself. People weren’t reacting like they were being sold to. They were reacting like they wanted the thing they love to survive.

One of the most clarifying TDWS conversations we’ve had in a long time.

If you’d like to work with Nicole, you can submit a request here.

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