Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, time for the anonymous mailbag to arrive and sweep away all of your work productivity. As always, send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

The anonymous mailbag is brought to you by the find folks at The Home Loan Expert. I’ll be hanging out with this crew on Friday and Saturday of this weekend at the SEC basketball tournament in St. Louis. Spring is inching closer and closer so why not get prequalified for a mortgage so you’re ready to pounce when you find the right house? No matter where you are in the country go to thehomeloanexpert.com today.

Okay, here we go with the mailbag.

“I’m getting married and my honeymoon to Disney World just happens to take place during the heart of the NCAA tournament. I’m a huge Florida fan and definitely want to watch the games. How bad would it be to watch the games on my phone during dinners and while waiting in line for rides? I mentioned the thought to her and she didn’t seem too thrilled. Will watching them against her will ruin the honeymoon? And will ruining our honeymoon effect the marriage? I need your marriage expertise here.”

Hold up, I have a preliminary question for you here — WHY ARE YOU GOING TO DISNEY WORLD ON YOUR HONEYMOON?!

You literally will have hundreds of hours of time you can spend at Disney World with your (future) children. You should use the honeymoon to go somewhere the two of you are unlikely to ever be able to go together again.

Look, I understand if you don’t have much money to spend on a honeymoon, plenty of couples have been in that situation before, but Disney World is expensive. You’re spending a ton of money to go to Disney World together. Sidenote: there were some couples on the Star Wars Disney Cruise WITHOUT CHILDREN.

Holy crap, do you want to borrow mine? Why would you choose to go somewhere made for kids if you don’t have kids? This is just mind boggling to me. (Confession: before we had kids my parents, my sister and her husband and my wife and me all six went to Disney World together. I have no idea what we were thinking here. This may rank as the dumbest decision we’ve all collectively made.)

For all of you out there reading this right now — pick somewhere exotic to go on your honeymoon if you have the money. If you don’t have the money, save up and take awesome trips together before you have kids.

Having said all of this, why are you going to Disney World on your honeymoon during the NCAA tournament?

This just seems like a colossal mess of bad scheduling to me.

The Thursday and Friday of the NCAA tournament are the two best days on the American sporting calendar, why would you want to be anywhere other than watching the games? (Incidentally, I’ll be in Las Vegas for the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament and we’ll have a VIP meet up out there and also be doing a public event with the guys at SBR.)

But back to your dilemma, you have no kids and are at Disney World for your honeymoon.

I think it’s perfectly fair game for you to be on your phone watching games while waiting in line for rides. What else are you going to do, you’re alone with your wife at Disney World, are there really that many topics you guys haven’t conversed about that you’ll need to discuss standing in line for Pirates of the Caribbean?

As for dinner, I think you can check scores, but I don’t think you can watch games at the table. Especially not at your honeymoon. That’s definitely rude.

To be honest, the fact that you’re marrying a woman who wants to go to Disney World for her honeymoon and who is already griping about you following NCAA tournament games while you’re at Disney makes me think you should call off the wedding now.

The rest of your life sounds awful to me.

But you probably can’t do that since the wedding is very close now. So…good luck.

“I’m a girl in a multi-year relationship so I need a guy’s help with several questions: How many guys on average pay for a porn membership? Or those snapchat ones that are considered “premium” or those onlyfan pages where you pay to see the whole body and some of the girls actually interact with you? Is this normal for guys or is this just really needy guys? Also, if you message or even send these girls money or gift cards in reward for seeing their naked bodies is this considered cheating? Like that movie “Bad Moms” where Mila finds her husband jacking off to a live person that he’s actually been talking to for a while. Is that cheatinglike the gorgeous Mila thought or is that just another every day thing for guys?” 

I could be wrong on this, but I think the number of guys who pay for porn memberships is a small subset of the overall number of guys who look at porn.

For instance, I would say the percentage of guys ages 18 to 45 who visit a porn website in a given month is probably like 95%. (And that might be low.) But I’d bet of those guys the number who pay for porn content online is probably no more than 5% of that number.

That’s because porn is mostly free online and the vast majority of guys can get whatever they want from it without needing to pay. Having said that, we’re talking about millions and millions of guys who are paying for porn every month and I think most of them are fairly normal.

Now would I also think that guys who are paying for porn online are less likely to be in well developed relationships with normal women than those who aren’t paying? Yes. But are there also some highly educated, desirable men out there spending money on webcam girls or online porn memberships that are great catches? Sure. Are the odds high that’s the case? No way.

Let me put it to you this way, if I knew a guy was spending a hundred dollars a month or more on webcams or on porn memberships, I’d definitely be less likely to introduce him to a single girl I knew and be more likely to expect him to be a loser. So if that’s your boyfriend, I’d be troubled by it. But I’d also balance out the way he’s spending money on porn online with other things he’s doing in his life. Is he otherwise successful at work? Does he treat you well? Do you believe he’s hiding other things from you in his life? Do you believe he’d be a good dad? I’d factor in all those things before I made a decision on whether or not to stay in a relationship with him based entirely on one hobby.

Hobbies are fine until they begin to impact your real life and detract from its overall quality. As a practical matter I don’t see why spending a hundred dollars a month on webcam girls is any different than spending a hundred dollars a month on Call of Duty. Both are online fantasies in one a really good looking girl is sexually enticing you, in another you’re a soldier saving the world, neither is any more realistic.

We all work to do things we enjoy and so spending money on things we enjoy is normal. If he’s getting enjoyment from webcam girls and otherwise he’s successful in life, I don’t see the issue with it.

As for whether it’s cheating, that’s for you to decide. It’s closer to cheating than watching porn or going to a strip club, but less cheating than having an online profile and meeting girls.

Good luck.

“My wife and I have polar opposite political views. I am a “conservative” by nature and she is a liberal, meaning I have to hear her shit political beliefs when I honestly do not care. I believe in guns mainly because, like any other southern guy, I hunt, whereas she has brought up numerous times that when we have kids there will be no guns in the house.

She now wants to go join a “Freedom March” in Los Angeles in late March to protest gun violence. Now mind you, in no way do I condone gun violence, mass shootings, or whatever else is going on in the news. I just want to take my 12 gauge out into the field with my dog and my boys and shoot some birds and rabbits. I own no automatic weapons and can give two shits about owning a AR-15 or whatever the fuck its called.

So my question to you is, how do I tell her I don’t want to join her/participate in this march? I think marching is for losers and literally have no interest in joining. Please help me find reason to savor a weekend I need to just lay on the couch and watch college basketball.”

I honestly can’t think of anything worse than having to spend an entire weekend day in a protest march.

Do you know how many hours I work all week long just to be able to sleep on Saturday without the alarm waking me up? And then you’re going to wake me up and make we walk around all day protesting gun violence? I would just tell my wife no if I were you. (Especially if, god forbid, you have to travel to LA to do it. LA traffic is awful, I wouldn’t even go even if all I had to do was get in a car, but I certainly wouldn’t fly on a plane to do it.)

Plus, what are you actually marching against? Gun violence? Come on. There is no one on earth who is arguing, “You know what we need more of?! Gun violence. I just wish more people were out there blowing each other’s heads off.”

I hate protests where you’re taking a political stance on an issue that literally no one disagrees with.

I’m pro choice, but I can understand why you might want to march on either side of this issue. I still wouldn’t waste a day to march, but I understand it. But no one is in favor of gun violence. No one is making the pro gun violence argument so you’re literally out there marching around all day so you can share a photo of yourself marching on Facebook and be like, “I don’t know what you did today, but I solved gun violence in America. Check out my selfie.”

Furthermore, I doubt this march is going to have a nuanced discussion about the way the courts in the United States are going to interpret the second amendment. Guns are a really complicated legal issue in this country and the last thing I want to do is be dumbed down into being a part of one side’s propaganda.

Anyway, I’m just anti-protesting in general.

My wife asked if I wanted to go the women’s march with her a month or so ago, on the anniversary of the first women’s march, and I was like, “Fuck no, I’m not going to the women’s march. If they try to take away bikinis or outlaw boob jobs, I’ll march, until then I think you guys have a pretty good gig.”

So I’d just tell your wife no.

“A group of friends and myself have recently had the argument about Sex Robots. The robots I have seen are straight TENS (google them). 

“I moved up to a big city in the north east from the south for work. I started dating a girl before I moved and we called it quits because of the whole distance thing, no big deal. It’s been a handful of months and I don’t know what the deal is, but the dating scene up here is a completely different. As a guy from the south who went up to DC for school, what advice can you give to us southerners who move up north after undergrad?”

I don’t understand it, but every girl in the northeast wants to bang me.

You put me on the streets of New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or Boston and it’s like girls are just trying to fuck me while I’m trying to cross the street.

I don’t get it.

It’s not like that in any other part of the country, but when I went away to college at George Washington suddenly I was a total sexual rockstar. And it’s not just when I was single; I’m going to New York in April with my wife and women are going to be trying to fuck me.

I can go all over Nashville and no one tries to fuck me for months. (Unless they know me because I’m “famous,” but that doesn’t count. Go to New York for a weekend and I’m Paul McCartney in 1968).

That’s what led me to my realization that you’re right, every part of the country has a different culture and a different ideal man.

It turns out I’m the east coast woman’s ideal man.

Why?

I’m not really sure but, my hypothesis is this — guys on the east coast are short. I’m six foot and I look like a giant on the east coast. In most of the rest of the country height doesn’t help me, on the east coast it’s a major plus. Also, bigger noses are popular on the east coast. So I’m tall with a big nose and girls just throw their panties at me everywhere I go.

But what happens if you aren’t as fortunate as me, what if you’re short with a small nose and you happen to live on the east coast? I think you go to the social media apps and find people from other parts of the country until you find your ideal region or state, the parts of the country where you used to make solid plays. Those women, suddenly in a new surrounding, are still likely to respond very favorably to you.

So if I were you, I’d go that route.

Or move back South. Or find a guy who looks like Clay Travis and try to be his wingman.

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Send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.