Empty Calories & Male Curiosity, #34 🥃

I'm Opting Out, Care to Join Me?

QUICK HITTERS:

1. On our 4th of July podcast Travis and I talked about our lack of sympathy for people who injure themselves by messing with fireworks. Cue famous person getting injured by fireworks:

   

2. Speaking of the SilentPunt Podcast, if you missed this week’s episode you can find it here. We talked about the best music eras ever, being sick, Liberia (😳), college choices, and data analytics. All in 20 minutes! Take that Smartless 🖕🏼!

3. This week’s book recommendation is for all of you folks who think that one side of our political spectrum is the cause of all of our country’s problems. A People’s History Of The United States, originally published in 1980 by Howard Zinn, is a must-read. So, turn off Fox News and/or the mainstream media for a few weeks, check this out of the library, and take a look at what we all were not taught in elementary school.

   

   I know a bunch of my subscribers will have already read this. Darla salutes you, the OGs of SilentPunt.

GOING DEEP:

I’m Opting Out, Care to Join Me?

If you have an email address that’s at least six months old, surely something like this will look familiar:

Every few months I decide, “ok, that’s it,” and take a good ten minutes or so going through emails and unsubscribing from spam accounts that have somehow acquired my email address. It is, of course, like the proverbial game of whack-a-mole: I delete one, and three more pop up. 

My email address seems to get passed around more than a doobie in one of those ‘That 70s Show’ circles.

It was either this or a P Diddy joke. You’re welcome.

I’ve done this at such an unsuccessful rate that a few years ago I pulled an ‘F-it’ and created a new email address. The thinking being, I’ll just use that for important stuff and slowly move away from my old address. To no avail, of course.

I am a white, wealthy, middle-aged man: otherwise known as catnip to advertisers.

Serious question for my AI overlords: How come any time I ask you to generate a picture of a middle-aged man, the dude you provide winds up looking like a poor man’s George Wendt? Can’t you please at some point make me look hot?

Well, if I can’t opt out of these goddammn emails, maybe I can opt out of something else.

But first…

The year was 1983. It was several months into the school year and I had just washed out of Catholic School¹ and enrolled in the local public school. Unbeknownst to my mother this school had a paddling policy. For those of you under the age of fifty this did not mean I had enrolled in a trendy new charter school that placed a high emphasis on outdoorsmanship. 

It meant that the principal of the school was allowed to call you into his office, alone, close the door, and then bend you over his knee and repeatedly whack you on the ass with a wooden paddle. 

(I’ll pause here for a moment to allow my 3 Gen Z subscribers to gather themselves.)

This is me pausing and making an uncomfortable amout of eye contact. And yes, I may have primed the AI this time to make me look “hot” and “chiseled.” Don’t judge lest you be judged.

Luckily for my 8-year-old self, the school district had begun to receive some pushback on the paddling policy in recent years. As a result, my school had an opt-out policy for paddling, which my mother promptly exercised. 

It never dawned on me until writing this piece how ironic it was that I went from a non-physically abusive Catholic School² to an abusive public school. If you are a male of a certain age and were educated in any way within the Catholic Church, you invariably get questions about priest abuse. 

My father, who attended Catholic schools, always has the same fantastic response: he says the priests left him alone because he wasn’t hot enough, but the nuns were happy to whack the shit out of him. 

While my mom opting me out of getting my ass beat was a turn of good fortune, her opting me out of sex-ed a few years later was not. As progressive as the paddling policy was in 1983, by 1988, when I was in 8th grade, the school district’s sex-ed policy was still lagging behind. Health class with Mr. Hoffman that year included a unit on sex-ed.

The two things I remember being taught in this masterclass in homophobia were:

• The only time your weiner should be in your hands is in the shower.

• Being homosexual was abhorrent because it went against God, and because a weiner wasn’t meant to go into a butthole. 

The words above were his, not mine. And my guess is that the school district did not endorse them. However, when you place the charge of educating 8th-grade males on sex in the hands of a Vietnam Vet who came to class every day looking like Sipowicz from NYPD Blue, then you’re gonna get what you’re gonna get. 

Two years later, in 10th grade, it was clear that the district had gotten its act together a bit. Because this time there was an opt-out form. Which my mother promptly signed. So, for two weeks, while the other students in health class learned about gonorrhea and herpes (did sex-ed consist of anything other than fear tactics at that point?), I sat alone in an empty auditorium.

Not only did whatever street cred I had with the other 10th-grade boys evaporate when they found out that my mommy wouldn’t let me take sex-ed, but whatever they learned (in addition to every STD imaginable), I missed out on. 

Therefore,

I didn’t know the difference between a vagina and a papaya.

I was incapable of discerning an areola from granola.

I couldn’t tell a clitoris from a Dolores.

OK Henny, we get it.

So here’s the deal: I’m opting out of Substack. Not Substack in the main, but Substack as an idea. An idea that we all could share our writing freely, and those with the best thoughts and ideas would rise to the top. 

Because the reality is that Substack is a social media platform. And social media is not about connection. It’s not about the high-minded guise of sharing ideas. Or becoming a more thoughtful world. 

It’s about money. 

To my subscribers who aren’t on the app, I’ll explain how Substack makes its money: 

• Some creators on the platform produce and disseminate their writing entirely for free.

• Some have subscriptions for a fee. 

Substack makes 10% off of every subscription sold by creators.

Just like any social media platform, what you see when you log on is a direct result of that platform’s algorithm. So, Substack has a vested interest in pushing creators who are making money to the top of people’s feeds. 

Which makes it more difficult for people to find writers like me. And I’m fine with it. I didn’t come here to become famous or rich. I came here to share my thoughts, ideas, and stories.

In the process, I’ve met many new people that I enjoy engaging with and learning from. So I’m going to keep on keeping on. Until this platform implodes and another takes its place. 

But I’m done worrying about how many people are reading pieces like this.

Because you are. 

And I am very happy that you’re here.

Thank you!

_______________

Postscript:

I actually make it a point to be a paid subscriber to several writers on Substack. In fact, every month I try to do one more. Not sure how long this is sustainable, but some people on here are just that great.

When I do this I try to forget the fact that I am supporting Substack, and focus on the actual human being that I am supporting. I’m hopeful that in doing so one day I’ll be in a random bookstore and come across one of their books.

Instead of crap like this…

Long time SilentPunt readers will be familiar with my disdain for Herr McConaughey. Miss Brown be careful, this is not a group you want to join.

Many writers on Substack also publish their own books. I try to purchase some of those from time to time as well. Here are just a few:

Authors from the pic above: Cara Achterberg, J.F. Riordan, Sean Patrick Little, J.B. Velasquez, Andrew Knott, and Paul Horton. I’ve linked them all so you can find them on your own as well.

I’m also awaiting an upcoming book from Chloe Ackerman and have just ordered one from Alex Muka.

If I am missing you - let me know!

1. That story is a DOOZY.

2. Emphasis on physical.