Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, time Outkick’s weekly anonymous mailbag. I guarantee anonymity on all questions. Send them along to clay.travis@gmail.com

Here we go:

“Ever since your tweet that “everyone has a porn price”, my friends and I have been debating this and other related questions, one in particular being “What is your price for getting a teardrop face tattoo?” Now, my first thought is that a tattoo is more permanent than porn. Sure, you can get the tattoo removed, but we’re assuming no take backs once you get it. However, 3/4 of us set our tattoo price as half of our porn price, mostly because it’s easier to explain a tattoo than a porn. I feel as if most people in society would be more understanding of a tattoo than doing a porno. Love to hear your input on this ever-pressing issue.”

I think I’d do porn before I got a teardrop face tattoo. The reason is pretty simple — the vast majority of people you interact with will never know you ever did a porn, whereas everyone sees the teardrop face tattoo.

Let’s just use me for example, what would my TV bosses at Fox do if I suddenly got a teardrop tattoo? It wouldn’t matter for Outkick the Show, hell, I could do Outkick the Show shirtless and no one would care, but on actual TV what would the reaction be? Would I still be allowed to do TV with a teardrop tattoo? I honestly don’t know. 

Plus, you can always deny it was you in the porn. I’m a brown-haired white guy who is in average shape. This is the single most common look in the entire country. Most of America is basically brown-haired white dudes in average shape. Sure, my improbably gigantic Steve McNair penis distinguishes me a bit, but it’s a porno movie, is it that rare? I would totally play this off as some dude out there — My fake porn name would be “Jameis Winston” — looking a lot like me. I might even retweet it and say, “I’ve got a porn doppelganger!”

No one would believe it was me. Everyone would just think it was a dude who looked like me.    

Sure, the teardrop tattoo can be pretty funny if, say, you’re a professional white comedian. I think I could do an entire comedy bit on trying to get hired and explaining away the tattoo in every job interview. Because this tattoo sounds even more ridiculous when you explain it, “See, I’m just really sad about (insert friend or relative dying) and I decided to get a permanent tear drop tattoo to show everyone that it’s like I’m always crying on my face. It’s like a physical metaphor on my face, basically.” (This is assuming, by the way, that your teardrop tattoo isn’t to reflect that you killed someone.) 

Anyway, I do porn before I get a face tattoo. 

My porn price, by the way, is $20 million. So if anyone wants to pay me $20 million for a porn, I’m in. Also, all you fake ass people claiming you have no porn price are liars. You’re telling me if someone offered you a billion dollars you’d refuse to have sex in a porno movie? Give me a break, life is about selling your labor to the highest bidder. You’re already selling your labor as a receptionist at a law firm for $23k a year. That’s somehow more noble than getting paid to do something that you’re already doing for free privately? Stop lying.

“I was in one of the large, home improvement warehouse stores and had to take a leak. I walked in to the men’s room and it’s a typical three urinal set-up. A guy was using the far left one so the time-honored Urinal Separation Protocol (USP) says that I should use the one on the far right leaving a gap between us. However, the urinal on the right was set about a foot lower for kids.

Is this situation grounds for a USP waiver and using the center one is OK. Or, should I have used the child’s urinal and muttered something about needing the extra vertical distance in order to unfurl my prodigious member?”

You still have to go kid’s urinal.*

*Unless there is a human hand or feces or something totally unexpected in the farthest urinal.

No need for a dick joke either, you’re making the decision that a normal guy would make, hence there’s no need to explain it. In fact, making a dick joke here, unless it’s someone else you know in the bathroom, in which case it’s encouraged, would be kind of weird.

Also, hysterical.

Think about being at the urinal in your place of work and some dude you don’t know goes to the kid urinal and then says, “I like to use the kid urinals because it reminds me how low my dick hangs while I piss.”

You’d be convinced this dude was a psychotic murderer and you might not be able to make it out of the bathroom alive.  

“I feel like you’re the only guy who can settle this argument. Several friends and I play in a Ryder Cup-styled tournament in our hometown every year — the field is mostly made up of old high school golfers, no one better than a 10 handicap here — and the final match on Sunday came down to one of my best friends and I in singles.

We were all square going into the 18th hole, a par 5 that ends up crossing a rock-bordered pond that guards the green. I hit a lousy drive and laid up, while my buddy — and sworn enemy, in this situation — went for the green and cleared the pond. I ended up hitting my third shot close and had a great shot at birdie, but he was dry and lying 2. We got up to the green and realized that his ball had rolled back into the hazard, still dry but perched upon a rock that made his next shot impossible.

He asked for a free drop and I told him no — I mean, he was in a clearly marked hazard, and the game was on the line. His team had already clinched the tournament, so this was all for pride, and I wasn’t going to cut him a break here. He ended up losing a stroke in the hazard but saved par, while I made my birdie putt to win.

A week later and he’s still pissed. He says that because we give each other breaks on the course all the time — including during a few cash games — that I was hiding behind the rules of golf just to get a meaningless win. For the record, it was a great win.

Was I being unfair? Is there a wrong party here? Does an apology need to be made?”

I don’t think you have to apologize because you made the right call here.

Let me explain.

You’re playing in a tournament that isn’t just the two of you setting the rules in an individual game. Everyone in the tournament is bound by the same set of rules as the two of you. His argument is that you should effectively treat this situation as you would if just the two of you were playing. But it isn’t just the two of you playing. If you were, I’d agree with him. You’ve previously set the precedent — even when gambling — that you’ll adjust the rules based on a bad break like this. But that’s a precedent you’ve set in a game that only features the two of you.

Here you were subject to a tournament of rules that everyone follows. If every group that’s playing also sets their own individual rules during matches then how do you feel comfortable knowing who actually won? 

Put it this way, would your buddy have argued he deserved relief if he was playing in this tournament with someone he didn’t know well? Probably not. In fact, even arguing this would make him kind of a dick. Furthermore, it’s not like this is a really, really bad break that is unforeseeable. Going for the green in two shots on a par five and having your ball land, but then roll back into a hazard is the actual reason that the hazard was designed in the first place. That’s why the green slopes as it does, to punish a player who doesn’t hit a really good shot.

I can see being lenient if something truly unforeseeable happened — your buddy tees off and hits a bird, for instance, knocking his drive down shortly after his tee shot. But this shot is on him. It was eminently foreseeable that his ball might land in the hazard, It’s why, for God’s sake, you laid up.   

The only thing that cuts in his favor here is that the outcome of your match didn’t matter in the final results. But I don’t think that shifts the equities here. You played by the rules for 17 holes, why change them on 18?

You were in the right and you should tell your friend to quit being such a pussy.  

“Following the past few weeks of dick procedure debates it reminded me of an argument during football practice over tucking up or down (not all of us could cinnamon roll it ala Mcnair). My argument is to tuck up: wearing compression shorts or having the need to secure the junk for athletic competition puts uncomfortable pressure on your balls from your shaft, which can easily be alleviated by tucking up. Everyone else thought I was a freak. I need your final opinion for my peace of mind.”

I think you’re a freak. 

Primarily because it makes me ask this question, how tight are your compression shorts if your penis doesn’t move once you tuck it up? I think I speak for the vast majority of men who say that even if we wear tight compression shorts it’s not like we frozen Han Solo our dick in those shorts. It still moves.

Anyway, I’ve never heard of anyone tucking their penis up. This sounds awful. 

However, rather than retroactively admit that I was a freak, if I were you, I would point out that the reason you experienced discomfort when you didn’t tuck your penis straight up was because your gigantic phallus would otherwise bounce on your balls when you ran. Conclude your argument with this line, “Guys, what can I say, having a gigantic penis is usually pretty great except for situations like this. Guess y’all will never know the feeling.”

(Note: any time you can end an argument by referencing your gigantic penis, real or imagined, you’ve basically won that argument. This is a famous, and rarely cited footnote, from Justice Earl Warren’s Brown vs. Board of Education opinion. Look it up.)  

“I’m in a pretty solid relationship with my girlfriend of two years.  But the beauty of technology these days is that you can pretend to be in a different city on dating apps (tinder, bumble, hinge, etc) without ever leaving home. So I’m on tinder, but in an east coast city far away from where I live, just to swipe chicks based on if they are hot or not.

So here’s the catch – I don’t actually use them to meet girls, or talk to girls that I match with. I just do it to look at hot girls in their 20s (I’m 29) and for the little boost of confidence I get when a match. Is that morally wrong? Am I just a creep? (probably).” 

I’ve heard from reliable sources that the Internet — especially Instagram — essentially exists so guys can look at pictures or videos of hot girls. This is totally normal behavior. But you have taken it a step further and crafted your own Tinder profile — presumably using your actual name and pictures otherwise what’s the point of seeing if you match? — so you can look at these girls pictures and discover if they find you attractive. Then, what? None of these girls ever message you first? If they do, you just ignore all of their messages and never respond? I don’t buy that. You’re essentially playing just the cheating tip here.

This is what you’re thinking in your mind: “I’m not cheating on my girlfriend, I’m just finding out who might be willing to bang me if I were willing to bang them too.” Sometimes verbalizing your actions helps you see how ridiculous they are.

Look, I’m no saint. No guy is. Do I occasionally/regularly/all the time watch disembarking airplanes and decide which girl I would choose to repopulate the earth with if suddenly a horrible virus broke out and she and I were the only survivors on the planet? Of course. But that’s totally logical. After all, the survival of the human species really might be at stake. My wife gets this. Who am I to end humanity? Especially with this hair having no progeny.

Talk about a tragedy.  

But how would you explain this to your girlfriend if she caught you? (And that might eventually happen, right? She probably has friends in the city where you’re matching with girls. Or you might pass out drunk one night and she might see Tinder open on your phone and wonder why you have dating apps dowloaded.) Then you’d have to say, “In my free time I like to go on Tinder and look at pictures of girls using a profile I created of myself but in New York City. Then I rank whether I’d like to bang the girls I see by swiping and wait to see who also wants to bang me. But, honest, I never talk to any of them and I really love you.”

Again, I’m a dude so nothing dudes do surprises me — we really are awful — but can you imagine her trying to work her brain around this?

Put it this way, if your girlfriend did this and you caught her, would you include the phrase, “crazy psycho bitch” in your explanation of her behavior to your friends? Of course you would. 

Your girlfriend is going to be the first person to ever think, “Why can’t my boyfriend just jerk off to porn like a normal dude?”  

“Clay, I need some advice. Last Thursday my girlfriend of 3 years comes to me and says that we should break up because “we’ve grown apart” and that it was “obvious neither of us was feeling it.” So after some talking, we agreed to break up and “explore ourselves” (cliché, I know) with the idea of staying good friends and getting back together somewhere down the road.

Anyways, the weekend right after she breaks up with me, she goes out and gets blackout drunk 3 nights in a row and came within inches of having sex with a couple of complete random guys she met at a bar before getting cold feet and coming to my dorm room to sleep off her hangover (this happened twice over one weekend).

I feel like she lied about why she wanted to break up, but I still love her. I’ve never been in a situation like this before and don’t know how to address it. Do I go out and have sex with a bunch of people right away as a counter? Do I wait it out and see if she’ll come back to me for good? Do I just completely cut off getting back together as an option? Or am I just overreacting to something that almost happened? Thanks for any advice.”

If you’ve grown apart, why does she feel the need to come spend the night twice in a row at your dorm room? I think the answer isn’t that you’ve actually grown apart, I think it’s that you’ve become her safety blanket. That is, you’ve moved from someone she likes to sleep with to someone she feels like she’s really good friends with. You’re too predictable and safe for her right now. 

She wants risk and adventure in her life and you’re neither of these things. There’s nothing wrong with that — in fact, it’s normal to want that in college — but she isn’t willing to actually let you go because she wants you there to cuddle her when she makes decisions that scare her. In other words, she wants to have her cake and eat it too. 

So here’s my advice, go bang other girls on campus and ignore her for the next several months. I know it’s tough — and it will put a strain on your friendship in the short term — but you need to demonstrate you have some balls and don’t just exist to cuddle her.   

You’re in college and you’ve been in a three year relationship. I think that’s a mistake already, but letting her dictate your actions after she broke up with you just compounds the problem. She felt comfortable breaking up with you because she believes that you’ll always be there waiting for her. Flip the script on her.

Once she sees other girls are interested in you — and believes that you’re interested in them — she’ll either come crawling back to you or she won’t. Either way you aren’t going to win her back anytime soon by being her security blanket.

(Also, she may have fucked those dudes.)

…

The anonymous mailbag runs every Tuesday. Total anonymity guaranteed. Email your questions to clay.travis@gmail.com