Sunday Reads: Gold Prospecting in the YouTube Era, Shady Fitness Influencers and Medical Man Caves

In my relationship, my boyfriend is the sous-chef, garde manger and chef de cuisine all rolled into one. Left to my own devices, I’m that trope of the 60-year-old dad who has no idea how to feed himself on the evenings his wife goes to her book club. Sometimes I’ll eat like, a bag of frozen vegetables or something. He’s not the only guy to be king of the kitchen in contemporary relationships, though. Over the last few years, cooking has become a very cool thing for guys to do. It’s taken a long time to get to this point, involving a shift in norms, responsibilities and consumer expectations in the culinary sphere. In any case, I’m happy to have my boyfriend serve me dinner on the couch.

Must Read

“The Lone Prospectors Keeping the Legacy of the Gold Rush Alive”
The term “gold prospector” conjures up images of toothless men with long white beards and wide-brim hats sifting through dirt along mountain streams for shiny little nuggets in 1849. Dan Hurd isn’t a 49er, but he is one of a new generation of prospectors keeping the gold-digging dream alive in the 21st century. Eddie Kim traveled to rural British Columbia to visit Hurd, who documents his gold-hunting adventures on YouTube. It’s certainly not because it’s easy to make a living off gold prospecting (it’s definitely not); instead, it’s about being out in nature and interacting with the Earth in a primitive way. READ MORE

The Week in Features

A Shoulder to Cry On
“Gamer girls” get a lot of flack for being, well, women who game, but at least some of them are getting paid for their trouble. On the freelance hiring site Fiverr, lonely gamer bros can hire girls to play online with them. And not only are they making their clients look good in games like Fortnite and Overwatch, but they also often function as amateur therapists. That is, for $10 an hour, players can tell these girls (and they are very much girls, as many of them are still in high school) all their problems.

An Oral History of Not Giving Oral
Though they might not seem like natural bedfellows, rapper Danny Brown and Junior Soprano do share at least one trait in common: They both love to eat pussy. How they process their pussy-eating truth is quite different, however. While Uncle Jun’s passion is an embarrassing secret that threatens his masculinity (and sparks a mob war), Brown raps about it with brazen confidence. In “I Will,” he proudly declares, “I go dumb and ignorant when I’m on that clitoris.” Thing is, that line is actually pretty radical. Because throughout much of history, not eating pussy has been the norm.

Dealing With the Office Enemy
You’re never going to love everyone you work with. Odds are, you might even end up hating some of them. But whether they’re annoying, rude or straight-up lazy, you’re gonna have to work with them regardless. Rather than letting them ruin your day (and potentially, your career) then, here are some ways you can constructively deal with the enemy who sits in the cubicle across from you.

Fitness Fakes and Swole Scammers
Every buff person on Instagram is trying to sell you something. Be it CBD oil, kratom or run-of-the-mill protein powder. In fact, fitness influencers are basically just walking billboards. According to Oliver Lee Bateman, the biggest problem with this, though, is that it’s all based on lies — advice that they don’t follow themselves and/or certainly haven’t gotten their swoler-than-swole bodies from. So why do we keep paying attention anyway?

Manning Up The Doctor’s Office
Despite prevention and early diagnosis being the biggest contributors to a longer lifetime spent on this planet, men don’t go to the doctor as often as they should. They skip routine screenings, ignore mysterious pains and avoid annual checkups. So as medical professionals try to figure out how to get men to regularly see a doctor, some are thinking far outside the box: Like, what if the doctor’s office were more, well, manly? That’s the idea behind Man Cave Health, a facility in Midtown Manhattan decked out more like a Buffalo Wild Wings than a clinical office. C. Brian Smith visited Man Cave Health to see if the concept is really what men need to take better care of their bodies.

The Week in Male Vulnerability

• Netflix’s new sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave is a hilarious meditation on male fear and their unwillingness to back down when wrong or embarrassed.
• 2019 is officially the year of Male Tears. Everywhere from sports to politics to Hollywood, men are seemingly becoming more and more comfortable with full-on public sob fests.
• Werner Herzog has built a career on portraying masculinity and male vulnerability on film (see Grizzly Man), but when it comes to himself, the German director is adamantly against his own introspection.

What the MEL Staff Can’t Stop Debating

The internet is united in agreement that the Sonic the Hedgehog movie look cringey as fuck, particularly Sonic’s teeth. They look so… human. Which is why we had a dentist explain why it creeps us out so much. Still, not everyone on our staff agrees:

But Don’t Just Take Our Word For It…

---

Magdalene Taylor

Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.