It’s Fucked-up Friday, and we’re ending the week with Michelle Kinney of The Mayday Network, who is becoming one of our favorite people (shhh, don’t tell anyone else!).
We opened still buzzing from yesterday — Fine Feminist Hour with Zuri Stevens and Zulfina from Letters from a Feminist, and then FiveStack with Zev Shalev, where Lawrence had one of his finest feminist moments on record. Both Michelle and I wanted to acknowledge it out loud, because it matters when men show up like that. Lawrence, gay man and lifelong ally, made the point himself: women have been his fiercest supporters. Why wouldn’t he stand up in return? Radical concept, apparently.
Then we got into it. Michelle brought the looks maxing story — a 60 Minutes Australia segment on “Clavicular,” a 20-year-old from Hoboken who has built a following around incel-adjacent aesthetics and is proudly collaborating with Andrew Tate. The clip of him walking out on the reporter mid-interview tells you everything you need to know.
My Fucked-up Friday entry was the CNN “online rape academy” exposé, about the online community of men drugging their wives and partners, filming the rapes, and posting them for community, clout, and sometimes profit. 20,000 tagged videos. Women in their own homes, with their own husbands, who have no idea. And equally as important: it’s about the men who are complicit, the ones who argue the semantics or data points of the story instead of expressing the horror it warrants.
I brought a proof point: a Substack thread I’ve had with a man named Paul. He is no one, but he is the story. Not because he’s raping anyone—but because his first instinct when confronted with evidence of mass rape was to question my data points, accuse me of being opportunistic, and also of being “not that dumb” in the comments. The Pauls are the problem. Men, we need you to do so much better than this.
The thread is here if you want to read it, comment, or restack it:
I won Fucked-up Friday. Lawrence conceded without a fight. I called it a tie with Michelle, because looksmaxing and sleep rape aren’t separate stories — they’re integrated, part of the same cultural phenomenon that starts at the highest levels of power right now.
Thank you Jason Odell, NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Chris Resists and many others for tuning in, with special thanks to Karen Marie Shelton and Yanni Hamburger for moderating like the champs they are.
We love you all, mean it!
