On Buttons & the Art of Pushing Them
CW: Adult themes, sextortion, anxiety, and sexual embarrassment. This is a comedic personal essay.
The story is one about growth. Personal growth, spiritual growth…phalli—I want to tell you the story of my hot boy summer.
Most of y’all probably know what Hotboy Summer means, but for those of you who don’t: it’s a play on Megan Thee Stallion’s Hotgirl Summer. It represents doing your thing, showing out, living your best life…being a hot girl. Because you’re independent. And empowered. Or perhaps just newly single and posting on instagram again, but at least one of those things. And when you embrace that—you’re a Hotgirl. You know, as opposed to the other kind.
Just kidding. It’s just Hotgirls. And Hotboys. Because we can be that too…right? Us? Men? Don’t actually answer that. It doesn’t matter. We’re gonna do it anyway. We’re gonna make hot-non-gendered-pronouns, because, you know—gender equality’s kinda like…our thing, now. Now that it serves us at least. But that’s what we do, right? Hotgirl, Hotboy—just another thing that used to be a woman’s but we took it.
Like the discovery of DNA.
Or the right to choose.
Damn, yeah no we kinda fucked that one up, huh? That choice should definitely be exclusively reserved for a woman to make with her trusted healthcare provider and the senator from Missouri—and that’s it. It’s nobody else’s business.
Nah, in all seriousness though, fuck choices. Like don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying fuck the right to make choices. Certainly not the ones that matter. I’m not saying we should take away people’s autonomy; this is New York, I hope you all know where I stand on that, and if you don’t, well…the sarcasm’s only going to get thicker from here. But on some real shit: I’m not saying fuck having the right to make choices; I’m saying fuck having to make them. Choices are tough dog. I shouldn’t speak for everybody, but where I come from, choices are tough dog.
See, I’m Jewish. And the one thing Jews do better than global conspiracy…is worry.
We fucking worry. It’s what we do. We’re a pragmatic people. We get there through a combination of shrewd analysis…and paranoia. There’s no trusting your gut when you got IBS.
And worry…worry is like a fungus. Right, it grows where it can take root. Except instead of becoming delicious mushrooms, it becomes delicioussss-ly crippling anxiety disorders. See worry grows where it can take root, and where worry takes root is in uncertainty. And uncertainty…is precisely where real choices have to be made.
So for me and my people? Choices can be tough dog.
But I’m good. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine now. I’m out the game, baby. Now I’m meddling in the dark arts—right, like mindfulness meditation and therapy. Out here getting faded off a Zoloft, my G. For real, I’m like, on my zen shit. I’m cool as a cat. But I had to become that way, to survive. Because see, I’m curious as a cat too. I like to pull on strings. Push buttons. Always have. And that’s good, right? It’s how you learn. Its how I learn. I find shit that way. But growing up, you expect the adults in your life to be the responsible ones, right? Like childhood, it’s kinda like a decade-long trust fall, with people you, in theory, actually really trust. Right? You trust your parents to make it all ok, to be the responsible ones. To create a home that’s suitable and safe for the children they chose to bring into this world. A world with dangers, and uncertainties, and…buttons. And I was a kid who pushed buttons.
Now, that term is used in a number of different ways, like, you push buttons, you egg people on. Or you push buttons, you learn by doing. You act on curious impulse, right? But for this specific story, I feel like it’s important to tell you that when I was a child, I discovered that my house had not one — like probably most families did — but *two* buttons. Well, they had many buttons, but two buttons were special buttons. See, these motherfucking buttons…were self destruct buttons.
Motherfucking self-destruct buttons. Two of them. My parents had them installed and, if you know anything about me — and at this point, you do — you know I found those motherfuckers. And what’s more? You know I pushed the shit out of ‘em. How could I not? They were there.
Then boom.
Next thing I knew: sirens—weeooweeooweeoo. Police cars, firefighters racing up the front lawn, the sound of banging coming from the door. They enter — footsteps — and, somehow through all the haze, make it to me. Sitting there frozen. Confused. What’d I do? Am I ok? What—I just…I just touched the button. The one on the side of the nightstand next to my parents’ bed. Where my mom sleeps. Am I going to jail?!
Deep breath, Don.
It turns out, my parents — in all their gloriously paranoid practicality — had installed a component into our home’s security system that I hadn’t been made aware of. A simple button. Round, white, about the size of a quarter—it was eminently fucking touchable…which is a pretty highly sought-after quality in the button world. And most importantly of all…it was there.
Right on the inside of her nightstand. Like, [hand motion like the curve of a woman’s body] if you felt along the edge of the bed you’d eventually find your hand between the mattress and the nightstand and—low and behold…baby girl’s right there by your fingertips.
Waiting.
Wanting.
It was in a suitable enough location as far as self-destruct buttons go. There was easy access for my mom in the middle of the night, but you wouldn’t ever really notice it unless you were doing…who the fuck knows what.
So there I am, doing who the fuck knows what. Whatever I used to do to pass the time before I discovered drugs and jerking off. And I feel her. Right there.
Waiting.
Wanting.
Now, the thing about…whatever you choose to call my unique flavor of impulse control deficiency…is that I only ever really need one. Just one. I suspect I’ll never need to press that button again in my life. But…I do need that one.
I don’t make the rules, these things…they’re bigger than me and you. We move through the world as water bugs gliding upon surface-tension tapestries unaware of how swiftly our serene ripples retire, basking barely beyond our precious present. I barely knew myself let alone the man who I would one day become, but the moment I felt it…I knew I was going to push that button.
And boom. Oppenheimer. Nah, fuck that—bigger: Barbie. The firefighters are leaving as the cops walk over to get the story straightened out and my parents aren’t home but they’ve been called.
And I’m just gonna go ahead and say it — excellent button. 11/10, would boop. Closest the real world for me has ever been to Amanda Bynes as Judge Trudy going “Bring in the dancing lobsters”
But it’s not ok. I get that now. I worried people sick. I get that now. The police have more important things they should be focusing on. I question that now. But I get it.
I learned not to push things with reckless abandon. To think about what a button does. The consequences of my own actions. This is where I’m learning I can fuck up. Developing a shell…a protective pragmatism, if you will. So I learn that I shouldn’t push buttons if I don’t know what they do.
Ok, should be simple enough. I know how to read. Most buttons at least somehow indicate what they do. And I’m not an idiot, hopefully. I can ride my bike without a grown up. I get to pick my own bedtime on Saturday nights before 9pm. Right? I can make my own fucking popcorn after a long, hard day of being an 8th grader. Well as it turns out…adults…the people we put in charge…they’re motherfucking idiots dog.
Quick tangent: so there was this thing invented by the military contractor Raytheon about a hundred years ago that used low-frequency electromagnetic radiation to heat food at unprecedented speeds. Adults being the idiots that they are, it took the better part of a century before GE introduced this radical technology to the American household, and now every single one of you has your very own microwave oven. Two decades later, my parents had gotten us a fancy new one. And this thing was cutting-edge. It didn’t have no analog dials…nah son, this bitch had buttons.
Amongst them, the aforementioned second self destruct button.
Now, for what it’s worth, when I say adults are idiots, I’m not trying to imply that they’re dumber than young people. No, as you’ll shortly come to discover, it was I, your humble narrator, who first pressed said button. And second pressed it because scientific results are nothing if not replicable…but that doesn’t mean we should give the grown-ups a pass. To be honest, I think the fact that we mistake the least dumb among for smart is one of the core misconceptions driving our societal downfall, but I digress. Grown ups are idiots and they’re also the ones in charge. They design the microwaves. They make the buttons. I just see what they do.
And it turns out, my parents bought a microwave with a self-destruct button that said “popcorn”. I shit you not. Maybe I just grew up at the precipice of Steve Jobs and the emergence of iPhones and iPeople and a iPresumption of intuitive user interfaces, but I made the crazy mistake of assuming the popcorn button made popcorn. Instead of, you know, blowing up the house. So after i took the popcorn out of the plastic and laid it on the rotating tray with the “this side up” side facing up, I close the door, press “popcorn”, and go to do whatever it is I did to pass the time before discovering the internet had boobs on it. And when the smoke alarm began blaring, it was only moments before the acrid rush of smoke hit my nostrils and the all-too-familiar feeling of worry — of deer-in-headlights concern over the chaotic unknowability of consequences in this world — hit my amygdala. That evening wasn’t fun. After the firefighters left, my mom — bless her heart — asked me what happened, before thoughtfully explaining to me that I needed to watch the microwave as I made popcorn. Otherwise, she said, the popcorn would overcook, explode, blow up the microwave, destroy part of the kitchen, and fill the house with smoke. Again. She fixed up the kitchen, tossed out the old microwave, and installed a new one.
But see, my mom — and, as far as humans go, my mom’s a relatively smart cookie — but my mom wasn’t aware at the time that she, like all adults, was a motherfucking idiot. And I wasn’t even that. It was like a person on mushrooms taking care of a person on wayyy more mushrooms. And on this mushroom trip we call life, there’s a lot that gets lost in translation. One of the most consequential things that she didn’t understand was the tremendously impressive depth of my ignorance — of what I didn’t understand. But that wouldn’t last very long.
And so the day after she installed that microwave, I came home from school, and went about my pre-pornhub routine of pre-pubescent paranoia and popcorn. I put it on the tray, upside-up, pressed the popcorn button, then stood there and watched that shit explode. She told me, with a gravity in her voice, that I couldn’t just press the button and go into another room. I had to watch the microwave. To make sure it didn’t explode. But then it exploded.
It turns out, what my mom meant to teach me was that I had to listen to the popcorn pop, make a decision as to when it was finished cooking, and manually stop the microwave before the popcorn proceeded to suicide bomb itself. As it turns out, the popcorn button is not a button that makes popcorn. It’s a button that literally just turns on the microwave for some pre-set amount of time that may end up creating one of your foundational childhood traumas, and it just so happens to have the work popcorn on it. And I just so happened to now have another reason to worry. And as I may have eluded to earlier, I hadn’t even discovered my dick yet.
But then I did. I went through puberty. Life didn’t get any easier. More things to worry about. I did that thing we call “growing up,” which I sometimes think may just be what I called the process of slowly losing track of the fact that I’m a fucking idiot. I thought I had control. Control over my circumstances. Control to not fuck things up. For things to not be fucked up. I went through life thinking I had tremendous power over this bullshit. To be honest, one of the more empowering realizations I ever had was that I didn’t. That sometimes things will happen that are beyond my control. Often times; most, in fact. But the golden thread within that weave of realization was that, while I couldn’t control most things, I could choose to focus on the few things I could. I could turn the microwave off mid-cycle. I could take control of my career. I could take risks; I didn’t have to solve for perfection in every corner; I didn’t have to leave doors closed for fear of what might be held behind them. Having gone through much of my life worrying, I needed to change direction. How I was wasn’t sustainable. It was a fortunate succession of destabilizing panic attacks that eventually provided the rock-bottom I needed to bounce off of. I got on new meds, started learning about eastern philosophy. I did the work in therapy to overcome my ego and my fear of not passively becoming impressive through god-given specialness and protagonist-syndrome alone. I achieved the sweet relief of recognizing that nobody really gives a fuck about me. I mean, perhaps save for my lovely idiot mother, but realizing nobody gave a fuck about me freed me from the shackles of making moves — or not making moves — based on how I’d be perceived by others. It freed me up to do the things I knew I needed to do to get where I wanted to be, but always feared. It freed me to take risks, to fuck up, to learn from my fuck-ups…
I decided to lean into what I’d always known was the path I wanted to be on. A more creative one. An explorative one. An entrepreneurial one. I went to business school. While there, I did several things. I started a company. I took a class in negotiations where I sharpened my conflict resolution skills into a samurai sword. I made the hardest choice of my life, ending a relationship with my — at the time — partner of 10 years. I allowed myself to do so without convincing myself that there was a right and wrong decision and without convincing myself that she had been anything but a loving and wonderful partner. I dropped out of business school to focus on my company. I’d become invincible. With a budding self-esteem serving to push aside an atrophied ego and a newfound vyvanse prescription, I was like the Dalai Lama with access to the drug from limitless. I was radically self-accepting. I was meditating daily and adamant about telling you so. I’d finally freed myself from my inherited worry; from the shackles of letting the fear of failure overpower the excitement of action. And for the first time in my new 30-year old life, I was on the dating apps.
The motherfucking dating apps. I was like Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Nah, fuck that — I was like Charlie’s grandpa Joe. That good-for-nothing, spent laying around in his bed, complaining and needing caretaking. But all of a sudden, he gets a chance to go to the chocolate factory. All of a sudden, his legs work. He can dance, celebrate…explore the wild world of confectionary craziness that he’d daydreamed and wondered about for years from the complacent coziness of his shared bed. To be clear, I’m talking about me and dating apps again. So I downloaded them all. From Jswipe to Ashley Madison, I was gonna try shit, meet people, and do the things I had wanted to try throughout my monogamous 20s, but couldn’t — for all the right reasons.
And it turned out, I was good at the dating apps. So much better at shooting shots and scoring than I had been a decade prior. It turns out, there are two ways to be good at dating apps: be very attractive or be an excellent writer. And fortunately for me, I’m devilishly fucking handsome.
So now anything’s possible. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? I’d already broken up with the person I’d spent my 20s envisioning spending the rest of my life with. And I survived. And I’ll survive. Fuck it…is exactly what I thought from the luxury hotel suite I was staying in one night, having traveled to Philly for work, when a new Feeld match messaged me asking if I was open to trading nudes. For those of you unaware, Feeld is like a sex positive dating app. It has people list their kinky interests and use pseudonyms to protect their identity until choosing to reveal it. The kind of place that could convince a man at the peak of his confidence that a female stranger would want to see his genitals at 4:30pm on a Tuesday. My brain immediately told me not to. I’d never sent nudes before — my partner and I lived together and, to be honest, our relationship wasn’t really of the freak-shit variety. But my brain often worried about what could go wrong at the expense of leaning into what could go right. I was getting better at being deliberate; intentional. At giving myself the opportunity to think slow and opt to override my impulses. She’s an adult, I’m an adult, presumably neither of us has anyone whose trust we’d be betraying by proceeding — fuck it. “Sure, why not?” I responded. “You go first.”
Add me on WhatsApp, she said. “Discretion — nice,” I figure, as I receive the notification that she’d accepted my friend request. “It’s me,” I messaged her, “the artist formerly known on Feeld as Girth Brooks.”
Lo and behold, a few minutes later, boobs. And by this point, I was well-aware that this was something the internet had in spades. But these boobs, they were personal. They were for me. There was a desire to them. They meant I was desirable. Worth something. Like two areolas for eyes, they made me feel seen. And she was hot, too. Just like in her pictures…the ones with clothes on. And now, she said it was my turn.
For all her flaws, my mother raised a gentleman. And a gentleman is nothing if not reliable. I strive to be a man of my word. I seek to be radically honest with myself and, I mean, just think about what it would imply about the man I’d become if I didn’t send this woman a photo of my member. So, that’s what I did. It was a most-tasteful nude. And she writes back enthusiastically. For all the things I had to worry about throughout my life, fortunately, this part of the process going over well for Girth Brooks wasn’t one of them. It you know what Girth Brooks is saying. She’d like to come over and hang out; she asked me to pick up some beers. Before I went, though, she wanted to see my cute face. “Send me another with your face in it. I want to see your smile,” read the text.
Though the nude she’d sent me had shown her face, this was one step too far for me. “I just founded a company,” I told her, “I’ve got investors and budding media coverage and can’t really risk having my face and penis in the same frame, unfortunately.”
“That’s ok,” she said understandingly, “it can just be of your face.” Risk-averted. Without getting up, I snap a photo of my face, orange athletic shirt draping my neck and upper-chest. I tried to make my smile endearing yet mysterious — gotta hit ‘em with that smize, you know. “You’re so cute” she responded, “give me a few minutes to get ready and I’ll head right over.”
A few minutes went by, and that’s when they hit me. All of a sudden, a flood of messages hit my phone. First, a collage. My glorious dick pic in all of its most-tasteful glory, haphazardly juxtaposed next to my smiley selfie. And in both shots, the unmistakeable image of my orange athletic shirt. Then, another collage — this person, whoever the fuck it is, as I realize I have no idea who I’m talking to — had used the phone number associated with my WhatsApp to find my Facebook page, learn my identity, and pull up a list of my Facebook friends and instagram followers. Three more collages, each one matching up images of old high-school classmates with my newly published penis. A business school professor. An investor. My Grandma. And in that moment, like a dam broken by surging storms, the worry came rushing back. My company, my dignity, my hard-won stature as a budding leader — all about to go down the drain.
Then, the ask: $500 or my dick gets DMed to everyone from my dean to my doorman. They don’t have anything against me and don’t want to ruin my life, but they will if I don’t pay, and I will regret it if I make them prove they’re serious. “That’s doable,” I think to myself as the panic lifts my heart rate. I’d finally discovered a method for getting rid of an erection near-instantaneously, but I couldn’t enjoy the moment. “I’m not an idiot,” I realize, “and once I pay them once, it’ll never end.” But I have to pay, or else they’ll all see…And that’s when I realized: wait, I totally forgot. I am an idiot. Nobody gives a shit about me. Yeah, I have investors, but they already know I have a penis. I mean, we never discussed it, but like…they knew. So what, I’d have to explain to my grandma that it’s actually become somewhat normal for consenting adults to do this nowadays, and it’s but for the cultural stigmatization of sexuality that this is a sin perceived as worthy of shame. I mean shit, maybe it was even feminist of me to send that nude.
And all of a sudden I’m thinking — here’s the kicker — worst case scenario, it’s about to go public that I’m packing heat. I’m certainly not ashamed of the tools in my shed, if you feel me. And yes, this whole essay was manufactured solely for the opportunity to publicly announce exactly that.
But all of a sudden, the slow thinking had pushed aside the impulse. The worry had its bitch-ass put in check and I realized, a slight grin growing across my cheeks, that this motherfucker just started a negotiation. And giiiiirl…who by the way I’ve since by the way realized is most certainly a dude using a poor woman’s nudes without her consent…but giiiiirl, I just finished taking Negotiations class at Wharton and let me tell you, your boy’s a savant.
So I assess the scenario. The decision-makers, the incentives, the points of leverage. And I write out my response. “Wow, well-played,” I begin.
“Here’s where we stand. You want my money, and your desire for my money is what is driving you to do what you’re doing. I understand that. What I also understand is that the possibility of getting my money is what’s making this exchange worth your time. You don’t have anything against me — you’ve told me that — you just have hope. So, I’ll remove that hope. I will type out this message and send it to you. The moment I send it to you, I will proceed to block your number on all platforms — not just those through which we’ve already interacted, all of them. You will be unable to respond, unable to send subsequent threats, and unable to even ask me again for money. At that point, what you do will be entirely your prerogative. But I can assure you it will not result in you getting my money, and thus it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth your time. To that end, I’ve never been in a position in life where I’ve felt more comfortable with the potential consequences of this moment than I do now, as I’m a single dude who works for himself and — for the first time in my life — don't make my moves based on fear of disappointing others. In fact, if you do this for me, you might even help me impress some. So, with that in mind…have a lovely rest of whatever part of the day it is in whatever time zone you’re in, and don’t forget to take a moment to go fuck yourself.”
Then I hit send, I did the things I said I would, took a deep breath, and spent a moment letting the rush of uncertainty pass me by as I fought the urge to wonder if I, once again, had pressed the self-destruct button. But I didn’t stand there watching the clock, waiting to see what the world had in store for me. I went out for a walk, leaving my phone in my hotel room. I could only control what I could, and whether or not I came back to 30 missed phone calls from my grandma was beyond the reach of the powers I have in this world. And that was ok. I’d be ok. I’d always be a work in progress — I’d come to accept that — but that meant I could make progress. And now, I finally recognized that there was power in my powerlessness. That I could simultaneously both love myself and still find things worth working on. That every day I could wake up and choose to be the person my Hinge profile thinks I am.
So I walked. And when I got back, I checked my phone. No texts, no missed calls. I picked my head up and saw, through the corner of my eye, the reflection of this audacious apparition residing within my body, orange athletic shirt still draping my shoulders, now held with slightly more surety than mere moments before. Fuck it, I decide to call my grandma. I love that woman. And in the absence of a forced awkward conversation, I could choose to engage her in a pleasant one.
So I dial her number. She picks up with a faint “hello?”
“Hi Grandma, it’s me!”, I reply.
And my grandma, bless her soul, replies with the apple pie aroma I so very adore airlifting the tremble in her 94 year-old voice.
“Girth Brooks, is that you?”