We’re not here to shit on everything — although it may seem that way. Still, some things are more bullshit than others, which is why we’ve taken the time to round up everything we truly thought left pungent bullshit cherries on top of the biggest bullshit sundae of a year since, well, 2016.
Criticizing men for taking paternity leave is bullshit.
Calling a man “soft” for taking two weeks off to spend time with his newborn child is symptomatic of everything toxic about masculinity.
“Only 15 percent of Americans think men shouldn’t get any paternity leave at all, and it’s no surprise that the majority of them are old men. That means people who think ditching out on family time in those critical first weeks of life are quite literally the minority, which is probably why they’re still yelling so loudly about it in the first place.”
Myers-Briggs is bullshit.
Myers-Briggs is an oversimplified, misguided personality test.
“‘Myers-Briggs is infamous for being the least valid, widely used personality test there is,’ says David Funder, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside. ‘People love Myers-Briggs because it’s enjoyable. It’s fun to discover you’re an explorer and talk about it with other people, in the same way it’s fun to discuss the latest shows on Netflix. And it’s probably just as diagnostic as to who you should date.’”
The recommended eight glasses of water a day is bullshit.
Because it doesn’t account for the large quantity of water found elsewhere in your diet.
“The myth is believed to have originated with a 1945 Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that claimed we need about 2.5 liters (or 84 ounces) of water per day. While this is actually a good number for most people — nutritionist Carolyn Dean suggests consuming half the number of pounds you weigh in ounces of water each day (i.e., you should consume 75 ounces if you weigh 150 pounds) — it’s also very misleading. When the bottled-water industry seized on the figure to boost sales, they conveniently ignored the vital sentence that closely followed the claim: ‘Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.’”
Having a favorite anything as an adult is bullshit.
Having favorites as an adult limits your ability to expose yourself to new things and shrinks your identity.
“Take the concept of a relationship ‘starter kit’ — the idea that each person should have a kit of faves at the ready to let someone know the art that most defines you. You pick a record, a book, a film and a piece of art and imagine them boxed up to hand over to someone you want to know ‘you’ — the real you, that is. But while these are fascinating data points, they are only entry points into the weird morass that is an actual person. You are not easily reducible, one hopes, to such shorthand. You are large, you contain multitudes.”
Fruit is bullshit.
Some fruit contains as much sugar as a candy bar and doesn’t deserve to be in the same room as vegetables, let alone on the same pedestal.
“The American Heart Association recommends no more than 36 grams of sugar per day for men, while the USDA recommends two cups of fruit per day for men ages 19 to 30. Here’s the thing, though: Depending on the fruit, these two guidelines may be incompatible, since just two cups of sliced bananas adds up to the maximum recommended amount, clocking in at 36 grams of sugar.”
IQ tests are bullshit.
IQ tests don’t account for real-world decision making, and rational thinking can be surprisingly dissociated from intelligence.
“These online IQ assessments are universally bullshit; you can consistently kick back numbers in the superior 130–140 range just by picking answers at random as quickly as possible. Assuming Donald Trump has any justification whatsoever for repeatedly claiming that his own IQ stretches to this formidable level (a couple of years ago he went so far as to peg it at 132), I’d guess it’s in the form of a bogus online IQ test’s final screen (which he made an assistant print out and laminate).”
The trap of ‘I love you both’ is bullshit.
It misses the point of true love.
“The answer to your dilemma is that, very probably, neither of these women is right for you. When there is a choice between two people, it isn’t always a case that one of them must be right for you, if you could only work out which. It’s more likely that you have two not-quite-right-for you people in front of you at the same time. I think the fact that you are feeling ready to ‘settle down’ is making you look at your situation and evaluate — and that is good. Just don’t mistake availability for suitability.”
Static stretching before working out is bullshit.
Since it’s both potentially dangerous and a waste of time.
“While Conlon believes that stretching is unlikely to increase your chances of injury during the activity, he says that it might increase your chance of injury while stretching. ‘When people do the quad stretch, they’re taking their foot and flexing their knee to 135 degrees, lengthening a muscle that may not have lengthened that far in a long time,’ he says. People don’t really need to stretch their tissues as far as they can before an activity, he continues, pointing out that it’s not exactly dangerous to do static stretching — it’s just not doing you that much good.”
