Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, and the day after Valentine’s, which means it’s time for me to solve all the problems of the Outkick universe.

Also, if you screwed up Valentine’s — and I know a ton of you guys were out there trying to walk into restaurants without reservations all over town because Valentine’s was on a Monday and caught you by surprise this year — it really shouldn’t be possible to make Valentine’s a Monday, especially the day after the Super Bowl — I hope you also didn’t make your significant other spend all day with you at a Super Bowl party and then also forget it was Valentine’s.

Because you guys are really screwed.

And I’ll tell you something else, after 14 years of being a dad at what age are kids on their own here when it comes to getting their moms Valentine’s and mother’s day and Christmas gifts? Because it’s one thing to try and avoid screwing up yourself, but then you have to do something on behalf of the kids for all these days too? This is just too much.

I think once a kid can talk they should be on their own for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas. I can’t keep covering for all you assholes into your teenage years when it comes to gifts for your mom. You have to start taking your own shrapnel, kids, I can’t dive on the grenade for years.

You want to talk about privilege? Kid privilege is off the charts. The bastards can get away with anything. So can our cats, by the way, the damn things destroy everything in the house. I’m not even kidding, the cats have done, no hyperbole, tens of thousands of dollars in damage to our house with their nails — it’s evidently inhumane to do away with their nails — and nothing happens to them.

The cats in our house — we have two and they cost me ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS each because they are Bengal cats — have actually taken to scratching the walls and pulling the paint off the walls as a result. The paint off the walls! Our furniture is all destroyed. I have flowers downstairs for my wife for Valentine’s Day and they just turned over the vase full of flowers.

What happens to them for all this destruction?

NOTHING!

Meanwhile I don’t throw away the newspapers fast enough or leave a shirt on the ground and I’m getting ripped to the high heavens.

I hate these cats. (And I’m also jealous of how lenient their behavioral standards are.)

Also, there’s no male equivalent to Valentine’s Day. This steak and a blow job day is never going to take off and exist because everything is toxic masculinity these days. I’m surprised we still get football, honestly. In the interests of equality, shouldn’t we do away with Valentine’s Day?

It feels really sexist to me.

As always, you can send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

Okay, here we go:

“I have an old college buddy whose wife, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago relatively young. She passed away before they began to have kids, so it was only him she left behind.

About a year ago he decided to jump back into the dating pool. When I caught up with him over the holidays, I asked how dating was going (thinking it’d be a lot harder these days).

He told me he has women throwing themselves at him. Now granted, this guy is no Ryan Gosling, but he’s in good shape, has a good paying job, has a decent sense of humor, and is still young (lower 30s). But this is not a situation that occurred with him while dating in college. Something has obviously changed.

His theory, using the word widower in his dating app profiles is like tossing dynamite in the dating pool.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking, what if this guy had kids too? If his dating profile said widower with kids, do you think he’d be slaying more puss than Teddy Roosevelt on a safari? So my question is, are chicks into widowers? And are they even more into widowers with kids? Maybe they have a Maria saves Captain Von Trapp fantasy going on?”

This is the perfect (dark) day after Valentine’s Day question to arrive in the anonymous mailbag.

Especially since over the weekend in LA, our young recent college grad producer was on Tinder searching for available girls and I have a bit of functional dating app knowledge now. We’re in an Uber on Thursday night and he’s sitting next to me as we head from one bar to another and he lets me start scrolling through the available girls and picking the ones he should match with. I haven’t been on a dating app before since I’ve been married for 17 years and they didn’t exist when I was single.

So let me just tell you, I was stunned by the number of girls whose opening photo is them in a bikini. STUNNED. I am so glad I don’t have a daughter after scrolling through and looking at these girls in their early twenties. Can you imagine getting to pick any photo to represent you to strangers on a dating app and going with a bikini photo as your first impression? I mean, you might as well be flashing I’M INTO CASUAL, NO STRINGS ATTACHED SEX in bright glowing lights on your profile.

I mean, I understand why hookers would do this — and maybe some of these girls were hookers, no problems there — but I was blown away by how many there were in bikinis. (I also have no idea how many of these profiles might be fake either.) Regardless, let me just say the ten minutes I spent surveying the dating app lifestyle didn’t make my think that most guys or girls are making many lasting connections on these things. The very nature of how you pick, tossing some people into the refuse pile and then waiting to see how many matches you connect with, makes the entire relationship seem designed to be disposable from the moment it begins. So I can totally see why this makes men seem less reliable, the dating app, for many men, just provides a steady diet of easily accepted or discarded female options. It’s like a free sex buffet. And in my experience no one ever leaves a buffet feeling better about themselves than they did before they sat down and gorged themselves at the buffet.

Maybe all these girls are fine with casual, no strings attached sex, but that flies in the face of everything I’ve ever seen from women. Even if women are pretending that’s what they’re after, what most want is an actual relationship. And, listen, if you’re a girl and you’re leading with your bikini photo, no matter how hot you are you aren’t going to attract any decent dudes at all. You’re just not.

Okay, that’s the background, just to show you my limited knowledge of these dating apps.

With that in mind, I think the childless widower line plays incredibly well with women because it proves three things 1. he’s willing to get married — which many women question, especially those on dating apps and 2. he’s not divorced, meaning something didn’t go horribly wrong with the relationship and 3. there are no kids involved, which would make things more complicated, that is, you’re the step-mom for kids dealing with a lost mom, that’s a heavy emotional lift for your average person on a dating app.

I think the natural response for most women when they hear that a man has lost his wife is sympathy. And then a desire to help him heal. Back in the day Adam Corolla used to have a great comedy bit where he told guys every now and then just to throw a fit. And then when a girl asked what was the matter, just to say, “I don’t want to talk about it!”

Because deep down every woman thinks she’s going to fix a guy. I mean, every single one of them.

And he’s right.

Most guys would be fine with their wives never changing from the wedding day. Not so with women, they’re always trying to mold you into something they like more. It’s just the nature of their sex. So this guy, who has lost his wife, is emotionally broken, at least to some degree, and many women find it incredibly attractive to fix him.

Add in the fact that he’s still relatively young and has a good job and I can see that playing really, really well in the online dating marketplace, where almost everything is rooted in cosmetic appeal and devoid of substance. Woman, much more than men, like substance.

Now that I’ve written this a bunch of single guys who have never been married are going to add “widower” to their online dating profiles and try and score on this angle. Which will probably make dating profiles even less reliable. Sorry, ladies.

One of my good friends from law school, the only guy I know who is a billionaire, used to have on his online profile, “I have health insurance,” and it killed too. Because while everyone else is trying to oversell themselves you never go wrong with smart, funny, and honest. Those three traits are so rare that if you lead with them, you’ll do incredibly well with women.

By the way, much to my wife’s chagrin, I have long claimed that I would have been dominant on these online dating apps if I’d been born about ten years later. I mean, just the Babe Ruth of the online dating game. Not because I’m that good looking, but just because if you get me in a text conversation with a woman most guys are pretty much illiterate. As a guy who actually wrote for a living, written interactions are a goldmine for me.

I can write and talk and most men can barely do either.

I mean your average dude can’t even manage a text conversation with a woman without looking like a complete and total imbecile. Women are FAR MORE verbally and textually articulate than men. That means most decently intelligent women are eliminating like 90% of the men from their dating pool just based on how dumb the men are in text messages and dating app messages. (Every woman reading this right now is nodding her head in agreement.)

This always makes me wonder, what if you had the skills to be great at something, but it hadn’t ever existed. For instance, what does Tom Brady do for a living if football wasn’t invented? He’s probably an insurance agent in California. I mean, a successful insurance agent, probably, because he works hard, but he’s not the greatest insurance agent who ever lived.

So much of success in life is timing meeting opportunity.

What are the chances there has been someone who would have been way better than Tiger Woods, but he never hit a golf ball? Wildly high. Because, what, like 1% of the global population has probably ever played golf at all.

A guy who would have been better than Gretzky at hockey may have never even seen snow.

This is like me when it comes to online dating.

Also I don’t know that I’m passing this skill on to my boys at all. So it might die with me and never have any actual application. My fifth grader loses his mind when I ask him to read a book for twenty minutes. (He tries to rig the Alexa to cut his reading time shorter.) He has no hope right now for any success in the online dating game with girls. I already know 99.9% of his online text game in college is going to be sending 48 different girls at whatever SEC school he attends for six years while majoring in some bullshit business degree area is going to be sending, “U up?” messages to all of them at 3:26 am.

Having said all of this, at some point wouldn’t the online dating game become totally exhausting? How many different girls does your buddy want to have to tell about his wife dying? I completely understand the desire for relatively unattached sex, but the pretending to be interesting in something other than unattached sex would be really draining. Especially when you have to talk about something significant that happened to you in your life with a bunch of idiots.

Which brings me back to the Charlie Sheen line, when asked why he paid women for sex, he said, “I don’t pay them for sex, I pay them to leave.”

And with that, Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day everyone!

“Not too long ago I installed a bidet on the toilet of our master bathroom. Nothing fancy, just a $40 add-on from Amazon that took 5-10 minutes to install. It’s some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Look, I get the whole “who wants water blown up their ass” push back, but the bottom line is if you got shit anywhere else on your body you wouldn’t just smear it off with dry paper. If you would use water to wash your arm, why would you not use water to clean a deep (likely hairy) crevasse?

I don’t understand how Americans have lived like barbarians this long. Especially the wet wipe crew. Why would someone wipe their ass with a baby wipe that has a cool name (ex. Dude Wipes) but not install a cheap, mini shower for their asshole? It makes no sense to me.”

I’m with you, the bidet is the Michael Jordan of bathroom appliances. But it’s treated like the Rik Smits of bathroom appliances.

I just don’t get it.

Your analogy is perfect. If you got poop on your arm, you wouldn’t get a dry piece of paper and wipe it off and presume everything was fine. You’d get soap and water and clean your arm. So why do we think that wiping a hairy poop-laden asshole with dry paper solves anything? In fact, it’s actually kind of awful to even think about because if you wipe too many times you might actually draw blood. (I’m sorry for getting graphic here, but how do we not all die from poop infections brought on by cuts in our butt regions? If you get a cut anywhere else on your body, the worst thing you could do is wipe feces in it. But that happens in the asshole region all the time and somehow we don’t get poop infections there. So are there special skin cells there to ward off infection? If so, why don’t we have those same skin cells everywhere?)

Anyway, back to your point, I think all homes should have bidets.

I’m 100% in agreement here. This is especially confounding because as a general rule Europeans are smellier and messier than us when it comes to personal hygiene. Yet they produce the bidet and just dominate us for asshole cleanliness.

I just don’t get it, it would be like if Moldova suddenly had the best tequila. It just makes no sense.

But is that why the bidet hasn’t caught on because we otherwise don’t trust the Europeans when it comes to being cleaner than us? This is like my theory on why left wingers won’t acknowledge masks don’t work. Because if they do that then they have to acknowledge that all the Trump supporting knuckle draggers were right about masks all along. And that they’ve spent the last two years wearing them for no reasons and forcing their kids to do so as well. So rather than admit they were wrong, they’ll just keep doing the wrong thing because admitting they were wrong would mean having to admit people they don’t like were right.

And were right all along.

It’s a big lie that they’d rather keep telling than admit they’d been lying all along.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but the longest lie I ever told as a kid involved a poster I had on my bedroom wall. When I was in seventh grade I had a Beverly Hills 90210 poster in my bedroom. One of my friends came over and later made fun of me for having a Beverly Hills 90210 poster in my bedroom. (It was one of the earliest 90210 posters out there before that guy in the cowboy hat shot himself. I was all in on 90210 early, no front runner here.) Anyway, I had that 90210 poster, Jordan dunking from the free throw line, the black and white Bo Jackson with the shoulder pads and a baseball bat laminated on my walls in like 1991. Getting a poster laminated, by the way, was like announcing you were going together in 7th grade. It was a big deal.) So, anyway, I didn’t have that 90210 poster up for long so I later lied and said I never had it even though there was no reason to lie. But once I told the lie, I stuck to it.

Then one day my dad was cleaning out a ton of old things from our bedrooms and planned to take that stuff to throw away at the dump. One of the pieces of detritus? My old laminated Beverly Hills 90210 poster. So one back in 1996 or so there it was, in the back of the 1985 crimson Volvo station wagon I drove, boom, like a dead body just waiting to be discovered by a guy who’d been denying the murder for years. Come junior or senior year, I opened the trunk and went to toss my soccer bag in the back of the car after practice one day and bang, I was caught, red handed by a couple of my soccer teammates who had heard my denial for years.

I couldn’t deny it any longer.

Which is, honestly, increasingly what the mask people are doing. Look at the Super Bowl, they’re just flouting the mask mandates because they all know they don’t work too.

Regardless, the bidet ought to be standard in all American bathrooms.

If we can have water pouring down from the ceilings into bathtubs, we can clean our butt holes efficiently.

We’re building a house in the Nashville area and a house in Florida simultaneously — I know, I know, rich guy problems — and I can guarantee you both houses are having bidets.

“I was questioned by a friend why I don’t wash my hands after pissing, my response was I’m 24 years old I’ve gotten pretty good at using the bathroom. After all I’m only touching the door and my dick when I’m pissing… I’ve seen other people do this but it pretty rare, mostly at bars, or work (manufacturing). I assume a lot more people don’t wash their hands every time they piss but feel publicly shamed into doing it in social settings.

This also had me thinking if the logic is that you touch your privates you should wash your hands how far does that go? Should we wash our hands every time after you scratch your ass. You could go on and on with scenarios but where does the line end? I wash my hand when I shit or prior to handling food, but just never when I piss because I don’t touch the toilet or piss on my hands. Am I practicing bad hygiene or is this common, especially in the comfort of your own home?”

Yeah, I don’t wash my hands after I just pee either.

My rationale is similar to yours, when I only touch my genitals, where are additional germs coming from? I know exactly where my dick has been all day, in my pants inside my underwear. This is true for everyone in public who isn’t a pervert. (If you take your dick out all the time in public, you better be a porn star or a stripper, otherwise you should be in jail.)

In fact, the single place on either human body with the least germ exposure all day long, on average? Probably the male penis.

So why do we need to wash our hands after we pee? If it’s just because you’re supposed to wash your hands and after you pee provides a good opportunity for that, I get it, but it’s not because of the peeing. It’s just based on your proximity to the sink and soap. I suspect this is actually where the hand washing routine became common.

Now, to be fair, I am a big proponent of using the generic hand wash dispensaries that are available everywhere now.

But the idea of washing my hands after every time I pee? No way.

And I certainly, by the way, don’t do it at home, which is where I work all day.

I do, however, feel like other people judge me when they see me walking out without peeing. So if you see me doing this somewhere in public, just know that my penis is very clean and you have nothing to worry about.

…

Okay, keep the questions coming to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

I’m off to pick up my kids from school now.