Dingus of the Week: DOUBLE HEADER TIME

Bumble and the kicker from the Chiefs battle it out for dingusry

This is the Weekly Dingus. The newsletter where I make fun of someone or something in the news that’s made our discourse just a little worse. If you like this newsletter, subscribe. Subscriptions help me be able to live and work in Iowa. They also help me pay an editor and a podcast producer, so we can make this content for you.

Where was that beard on January 6?

Dingus #1: A damp sweat sock of a human being

This week, the kicker for the Chiefs became the recipient of some swift kicks to his own ass after a video of him giving a commencement speech at Benedictine College went viral.  During his speech, this Temu-branded Travis Kelce knockoff¹ choked up as he told the women in the audience that their greatest calling in life was to be a wife and a mother. 

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Harrison Butker said. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”

The offensive player continued to be offensive by throwing in some homophobia with a tortured reference to a “deadly sin sort of pride that has a month dedicated to it.” The man who owes his Super Bowl rings to the leadership of a Black quarterback also commented on the “tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

It was a real bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you moment for a man who looks like an LA megachurch pastor on the verge of getting #MeTooed — his own mother is a medical physicist. It’s like men would rather make misogynistic commencement speeches than go to therapy. 

Imagine spending decades as a woman in STEM at a prestigious university while raising a family and then your son grows up to give a speech where he’s like, “Women ain’t shit unless they’re homemakers.” Happy Mother’s Day? Raising a son like this glorified sports foot is literally my worst nightmare. 

The sentient fascist haircut looked around at America passing anti-LGBTQ laws and restricting women’s reproductive freedoms and thought, the thing I really want to kick is not footballs but people when they are down.

By the time I sat down to write this, the bearded moldy loaf of neufchatel had been called out by everyone from Maria Shriver to the NFL to Kansas City itself.

Which is great! He’s the one we should be kicking here. 

That limp sweat sock of a man even had the audacity to cite Taylor Swift in his speech. In doing so, he used the line “familiarity breeds contempt” — which is fitting, because now that we are familiar with this man, we all hate him.

I hope his wife is planning a Gone Girl on his ass.

Dingus #2: Bumble

This week, Bumble apologized for ads that mocked women for not being on their shithole dating app. The ad campaign, which is in response to women opting out of dating apps, called women out, arguing “a vow of celibacy is not the answer.”

What a choice for the “female focused” dating app to shame women rather than addressing the male behavior that ran us off those apps in the first place!

Like it’s not enough that the app profits off our misery or monetizes human interaction; now it can insult us as well.

In addition to approving judgmental ads that reinforce the madonna/whore stereotype, Bumble’s CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd² isn’t done making our lives a little worse. Wolfe, who met her husband while skiing, suggested that AI personas could take over dating apps.

Which, okay, initially this sounds fine from my perspective. At least ChatGPT replies to texts. AI probably won’t send me dick pics or speak entirely in lines from The Office, which was a fine TV show, but not good enough to be your entire personality.

AI is going to ask me questions about myself besides “wyd?” And “u up?” 

But imagine the let-down of having a great conversation on an app only to go on a date with the human using the AI avatar and realize they’re less sentient than a line of code.

Actually, now that I am thinking about it, I’ve seen Transformers and I’m pretty sure dating a robot would be great. ChatGPT, are you single? 

Runner up: Samuel Alito

Alito is a previous dingus award winner. But this week, Jodi Kantor at the New York Times broke a story that the Supreme Court Justice flew a flag upside-down at his house, a symbol of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign. In an emailed statement to the Times, Alito wrote, “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

And like, I have to know what that “personally insulting” language in the yard sign was? Was it “Hate has no home here?” Was it one of those “No matter where you are from, we are glad you are our neighbor” signs?

I’m imagining Samuel Alito pulling up to his house, seeing this sign on his neighbor’s lawn, and being filled with an overwhelming rage. He shouts. He pounds the steering wheel. He retches onto the driveway. He sobs. “LOVE IS NOT LOVE!!”

And now for something good

The WNBA season has commenced. *Shania Twain voice* Let’s go, girls!

A new season of the Golden Bachelor has been announced and I am going to LOVE watching all the men vie for Joan Vassos’ attention.

Sophie Turner is doing amazing.

A new portrait of King Charles was recently unveiled and I have to say, the jokes about it are delightful. And the painting actually slaps. 

Maura Judkis is an American hero and tried to pet all the dogs at Westminster.

What I am drinking

This week, I was in California for the last of my book events before the fall. I am so sorry if I didn’t get to see you out there. But I need to go home. I am tired and I miss my house and my flowers and my dogs. I miss the Midwest. I miss waving to my friends in their minivans on my long walks to the park. I miss my running group and the intimate layers of our friendship. I miss my friend Zach yelling at me in bars. I miss walking into my local bookstore and gossiping with the owner. I miss going to my favorite restaurant and being treated like I’m the president of the United States. I miss the way the light comes in through the windows of my house and lights the chaotic bookshelves in my living room. The shelves are chaos because they are loved and used. I miss my loved and used spaces. I miss this tiny heaven I built out of nothing. 

I am ready to move on to the next projects and tell new stories. But I don’t take any of this for granted. I feel so lucky to have the life I do. 

And I did get to meet so many of you. And holy hell, you are all impressive. I feel like every time I met someone at a book event you were all politicians, bioethicists, authors, producers, community organizers. So much really good hair, so many amazing outfits, such glowing skin. You all are the best. 

When I got to California, I was met at the airport with a salad and a can of Moment sparkling water. This set the tone for most of my California experience, which involved a lot of vegetables, hiking in the mountains, and people using words like “thought work” (isn’t that just thinking?) and “minimalism.” (How can you talk about minimalism when your home prices are eleventy billion dollars??) 

But holy shit. You cannot beat the views.

When I return to Iowa, I will still not know how to open the door of a Tesla or pronounce Erewhon. But the real friends were the green smoothies we drank along the way. I love you, California, but I’m ready to sit in a dive bar and drink an Arms Race with a Jim Beam back and pound two perfectly cooked cheeseburgers with jalapenos.

But before then. That Moment sparkling water is and was DELICIOUS. It has all sorts of things in it. Adaptogens? Great. I don’t know what they are, but inject them into my body.

I have to say. I love a drink with fancy little things in it like vitamins and collagen and antioxidants and adaptogens. I’m not convinced any of those things are real, but I also think that drinking them will heal me. Heal me from what? I don’t know. But I will be healed.

1. Thank you to newsletter subscriber Tom for making this joke. However, my editor has now banned me from making any more Temu-related jokes until after Labor Day.

2. Between Harrison Butker and Wendy Wolfe Herd, the last names sound straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. As my editor said to me, “If the Dingus were fiction, people’d say you went a little hard on the names.” But this is real life. And we got a Butt and a Wolf Herd. And I’m biting my tongue so hard.