Brownie Points and Booty Calls

Is it wrong to do things to curry social favor when we're not all rewarded — or punished — the same?

If you like big fancy words and believe yourself to be a utilitarian, you care about outcomes over intentions. Specifically, a maximum positive outcome for a maximum population. This sounds good at first pass, like all-you-can-eat sushi. Only the former links up with the latter as you quickly realize not everything is as it seems, something tastes a little funny, uh-oh, oh god, this isn’t what I bargained for, where’s the toilet.

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Know what carries maximum positive outcomes for maximum audiences? Liking, sharing, the works!

A paid subscription is also far, far cheaper than the average sushi dinner. There’s zero risk of food-borne illness. There’s guaranteed stability + appreciation from a currently unemployed writer. 

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Last week, I wrote out some ways to be kinder, damn it. Small kindnesses abound, but we often get in our own way executing them. 

I pixel birthed this piece, then felt a little dumb.

Part of this dumbness is itself dumb, a continuation of the self-doubt potholes many of us struggle to avoid after hitting publish. What we write inevitably ends up feeling curdled, overcooked and undelivered, a shell of its initial idea. Luckily sometimes people on the internet comment nice things and we feel better. (I mean that, thank you people on the internet.)

The other voice that radio’d in was a bit unexpected. It had a nagging, albeit well-intentioned thought ship, and it docked somewhere around this question: Is it really so kind to perform kindness?

If you have to go about scheduling ways to practice being a nice human being to folks you probably already care about, and those ways often end up being rehearsed more than organic, are you actually a nice human being? Where does praxis become premeditation, how does social conditioning enter the party, and is the whole thing even worth the brain rot if good deeds result anyway in good outcomes?     

I’ll be honest, this one pivots down a few roads surprising even to myself. Trail along with me. Our first fork in the road actually begins not with kindness itself.

Big-time naughty people, everyday naughty people, cancel culture, us.

What’s unfortunate about good versus ungood explorations is that loud, heinous actors crowd out the real introspection many of us seek to benefit most from. Meaning dialogue on who we want to be and how we should act to get there often devolves into pointing out obvious opposites — the deepest, most despicable examples of human atrocity, then mumbling, “Well, at least I’m not like that! Look kiddos, don’t be like that!”

I don’t think this is the main branch in this conversation tree, but it needs to be acknowledged that umbrellaing all this is power and agency. We don’t grant these things equally to everyone. Contemporary efforts to shine light on these imbalances then often get chomped up by larger and immediately politicized discourse pitting people on existing sides. Goodbye, any attempt at the original, everyday how-should-we-be question.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to note cancel culture’s loudest naysayers tend to be groups interested in status quo superiority or neo-liberal respectability politics.¹ This phenomenon is called status threat, and it’s defining a large chunk of the world’s current political climate.

Attempting to rebalance social goodness scales are advocates who tend to come from the entanglement of outward identities and their related, intimate life experiences that are pretty fucking tired of being told, directly and indirectly, to just suck it up, sweetie.

This is an exhausting seesaw, but its central lever has always been accountability. That’s all. Scrub away the status threat politics (for the moment, just a moment). People just want some damn accountability. They want the values they were moralized to follow as a kid rewarded in kind as an adult, but live in a world that continually sees the opposite unfold. The conniving seem to get bigger and bigger slices of the pie. The capital holders more capital. Insiders stay insiders, manipulate social levers to box out threats and outsiders, the vast majority of whom are left pointing fingers at each other while fighting over scraps.

Accountability promises the silver lining for those times in our lives when we’ve been wronged. But hopefully, ongoingly, it offers morsels that feel appropriate to munch on quietly and personally for ourselves, to inch closer toward that truer version of our most accountable self moving through the potholed world. Moving through how we want to love, be loved, be remembered.

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📷 here

Here’s the rub, and it’s going to rub some people the wrong way:

Trying to be a good person might be the one thing keeping most of us good people.

Unfortunately, if many of us are committed to irredeemability, it doesn’t motivate poor actors of any scale to change. 

Now note, you knee-jerk junkies: None of this conversation applies to abusers. Like, the real scum buckets of the earth. This only applies to everyday average schmucks, which is most of us. That should go without saying but I’ll say it nonetheless so none of you can yell at me.

Within the average schmuck sphere of influence, it doesn’t feel there are many things in our direct control. Introspection and empathy are. Neither demands much of a schedule, pre-penciled planning. There’s a hundred different tools and modalities helpful to cultivating away at each — journaling, volunteering, reading fiction, doodling, music, therapy, long voice notes, afternoon walks, library visits, coffee chats with friends. Starting a silly Substack.

We overcomplicate, mystify, even commodify the empathetic and attunement sides of ourselves pointing us toward mutual care. Today I’d hardly say it’s easy to be continually chill and kind, to keep these natures at the forefront. What’s more, many of us are not encouraged or conditioned to do so, because the lived experiences stemming from our small towns and our gendered upbringings and our career aspirations and our family patterns and our education system and even the mixed brownie batter of our successes and mistakes told us to worry first and foremost about ourselves. Which is to say, goodness is chiseled and rewarded differently in different folks. So are the social penalties for deviation. It adds complexities to this whole crowded circus, yet at a certain point, you and I have to throw our hands up lest we get too dysfunctionally esoteric. If your intention is to be a good person, and you bear this in mind most of the day, most of the time, your actions follow suit. Outcomes as well. Maybe, possibly, just fuck the rest of the noise.

Okay. But you mentioned booty calls in the title. I like booties. So I clicked. How tf do they work in??

I can’t think of many things that are as villainized, as perceived as an ultimate selfish contemporary act, as an ex hitting you up for what’s clearly a booty call. 

Also, for what it’s worth — and I think it’s worth a lot — we’re still largely uncomfortable talking openly about women’s pleasure, and the entire performance that often is sex. Especially women’s performance of sex.

📷 here

Booty calls are a uniquely contemporary headache considering you need an instantaneous form of communication technology to initiate one. I, personally, would be amused to bits by examples of old-timey booty call, though I suppose you could count some of Shakespeare’s sonnets in this vein, many of which are so innuendo horned up they ought to require checking an “Above 18” confirmation box to access.

A booty call also requires little to no introspection or empathy. In fact, it generally tends to go smoother when these things are left on standby. 

I’m a lady. A gal. A woman. A (mostly) straight woman. Part of being a woman is to have your sexuality scrutinized and sensationalized in conversations so far out of your control it’s almost laughable. Almost. On your own terms it’s still a thin beam to walk owning sex and sexual performance as a (mostly) straight woman, even today, with all the pros and cons and pressures fueling how you show up around intimacy. Be too excessive about it, especially in heteronormative exchanges, and you risk the u-rah-rah bubblegum brand of pro-sex feminism popularized in the late eighties and nineties that’s individually fun but institutionally vapid. (Cough cough, she’s such a Samantha.). You risk the pick me conundrum. But keep these topics too close to your chest, blush too much at sex talk, at investigating sexual performance conditioning, and these days it’s not uncommon you’re suddenly ideologically lumped in with Layla, your friendly neighborhood Mormon Trad Wife. All when you couldn’t be more weirded out by Layla. At all.

I don’t think this binary mess is all too different when talking about kindness. The conversations are shockingly parallel — who performs it, why they do it, how it’s perceived and rewarded. 

I’m not interested in moralizing sex, or heteronormative women’s sexuality. Not now, at least. But do not, I repeat, do NOT, mistake this as some sermon against casual sex. I swear to god if I had my way, we’d all be walking around naked feeding each other chocolates like we’re in a god damn Lindt commercial.

Right now, I’m interested in sex as performance. I believe it’s right there, arm-in-arm, with kindness as performance. I’m interested in the gendered dance of it all, and the conditionings that got us to behave and be rewarded for exhibiting specific acts in the right doses with the right people. This is where brownie point do-goodism and social conditioning overlaps. You’re taught to be a certain way. You learn to nail the routine. Eventually, it does seep into you, blurring nature versus nurture. The pro-social performance spins ever on.

A booty call is not going to curry you much widespread social favor. It’s arguably not particularly pro-social. It may feel fun in the moment, meant to scratch a very specific itch. But it doesn’t tend to end well, because it’s devoid of meaningful intentionality, connection, camaraderie, empathy.

Brownie-points kindness done for the sake of appeasing others will curry social favor, and generally that is a good thing when it creates great relationships and a beautified world. Plain and simple. If you’re a lady though, it’s expected and better rewarded for you to be habitually selfless more than it is of men. That’s not so plain and simple. It’s a troubling expectation pill to perpetually swallow.

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So here I am, a woman, who last week verbatim said “Stop Overthinking Kindness,” now doing exactly that. Still, I’m imploring people to keep pounding this drum. Wondering aloud how to be truly kind in this world, while also acknowledging that feel-good bumper sticker can and should land differently depending on who you are and how you identify and how you grew up.

That doesn’t defeat the message.

All my life, I’ve been socially conditioned and primed to perform niceness. All women are. Beauty and kindness still remain the strongest cultural currencies prized in heteronormative femininity. Sprinkled alongside academic studies, there’s an ocean of stories and anecdotes I could share where people pleasing, fawning, friendliness during deep discomfort or fatigue, even just a perpetual polite smile brought me genuine praise and connection — even as it turned exhausting, even as it felt demeaning — which in turn reinforced the whole loop.

By and large my slice of the world is better off because I try to put kindness first. Yet I don’t know if I always am.

What I should have noted last week is that women are often expected, as the default, to perform kindness. Other-focusedness. Ongoing activity for the uplifting of their communities and loved ones.

I should have stressed this is often an unfair burden. I should have further detailed the deeper beneficiaries to both practicing and receiving more outward expressions of small kindnesses should be men, horizontally, with other men. I mean this. It would be revolutionary. It would be something the world deserves. 

That isn’t to say all women should turn off altruism, or that all men are heartless, self-centered pickleheads.

Do good things because they stem from a place within you where head and heart best align. Do good things because it feels right to do them. Do good things because they feel good and hurt no one. Do good things because you’re trying to figure yourself out. Then go eat a pan of ooey gooey brownies. And don’t send a 1 A.M. text to that ex.

Am I overcomplicating this? Maybe. Probably. Let me know. We can scratch our heads together.

1. It’s important to name both sides of this heavy coin. The loudest cancel culture vultures, unsurprisingly, tend to be your Fox News pundits, your WASPy finance bros, your Boomer grandpas, and a troubling faction of standup comedians. Yet there’s a quieter, trickier nemesis who takes the form of nonconfrontational hand-wringing do-gooders who just think cancel culture has gone too far. (**Refuses to give any grounded examples of how, nor can seemingly read the political status threat room.**)