Hey, listeners of the Cup. I'm Rachel Thomas, CEO of Leanin. Check out our podcast till we dig into topics at the intersection of gender and culture, including how women can break the burnout cycle, why we all need to challenge binary views of gender and how we can help boys get out of the so-called sandbox. We'll be dropping episodes every other Tuesday. You can subscribe to tilt at a leanin podcast on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen to.

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That's drink a U. S. The cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, the cut, the cut. Why did the hipster burn his tongue on his coffee because he drank it before it was cool. I feel like a grandpa repeating that old joke, but that was the mood around me when I was first getting into like Twitter, so much of listening to music or being a consumer of movies or art or fashion or whatever was about snobbery and irony, getting to things first, like cool, weird things before anybody else.

But as culture does, I feel like there's a pendulum swing now in the other direction where we're all like, you know what rules Phil Collins, an animal crossing and crocs feel like we just don't have the energy for snobbery anymore. I mean, I don't I want the comfort food of culture. You're right, that definitely is more in vogue, more so than when I was 20 or eight or 10 years ago.

And author Raven Lalani is here for it. Ernest is a vulnerable and overt way of interacting with the world. I feel like it is a way of a being that is against self-protection.

I feel like there's this sort of cool, practiced earnestness, the kind that is like pretending you're not wearing makeup when you're actually wearing makeup that looks like you're not wearing makeup. And then there's real earnestness that is just your bare pockmark skin open to the world, exposing who you really are, your dorky weirdo self.

The way I learn to interact with things I loved was first through fandom. That's sort of what's beautiful to me about loving a thing and engaging with with other people who love it through that love as opposed to what you don't like about it. May I ask what you were a fan of?

A lot of things I grew up playing. You know, J.R., PGS, I grew up our Japanese role playing games. OK, thank you. I grew up watching a lot, a lot of anime and my brother too. He like passed down his comic books to me for safekeeping when he left the house, you know, being able to escape into those imagined worlds and feel feel comfort there and with fandom, you know, I think perhaps any hesitation I have is rooted in like the old teenage adolescent fear of when that was a private, almost shameful thing.

But it's not private anymore. Raven Lelani, his debut novel, Lustre, is full of things that would have once, maybe 10 years ago, been considered guilty pleasures. Her main character, Eddie, is a bit of a sensualist and a hedonist. You peer into her brain and you have this totally open look into everything. We normally keep private ECN down. Sticky Fried Foods has risky, ill advised sex with her coworkers. She blasts disco music in her rat infested apartment.

She's also a nerd and a fan, and she loves all that dorky GPG type stuff.

You know, the way that manifests in the book is disco. You know, the way it manifests is is fandom is ComicCon.

But were you at all hesitant about coming out as like a fan of all this, like, earnest stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I a little bit, because I think that when you claim the things you love out loud, it opens you up for criticism in a different way. You know, it does affect judgment in a different way. And I think that's it. Right. Like you, the things the like earnest parts of ourselves that we keep private, we keep private because we are because we worry about the way that judgment will recontextualize that desire and maybe make it a shameful thing.

And so in a way, in a way, I was worried. But like I think I've gotten to a point where there's just so much I feel like I've hardened. I feel like I've become more cynical in a way. And so the parts of myself that are still earnest, like I cling to, you know, the parts of myself that are earnest, I feel it's necessary to to fly that flag because I think those, you know, those joys are are rare and kind of few and far between.

I mean, you bring up this really interesting question, like, do we need the barrier, the barrier between like that true soft part of ourselves and our hard external selves? In some ways I want to be like, yeah, the barrier is dead. Let's all just show our soft sides and be super earnest. Now, like, that's also privacy.

I mean, I'm of two minds and both minds are coming, you know, are within the head of a black woman. So like I will say that, like, I greatly value my privacy. I mean, I just do I think that there's something about having a safe space that is separate from the kind of brutality of the outside world. And I really want a world where black women don't have to be hard. You know, I want a world where black women not have to be strong and don't have to endure that.

That's part of why I wrote this character. You know, she's she's a character who when she's hurt, she's hurt. When she something happens to her, she lashes out. She's a human and is allowed a human response, at least on the page. Right. I. Go a thing where she's allowed that, but in the real world, you know, in the real world, I can't move through the world like that. I mean, I just can't that that just is the world I live in.

So is earnestness a privilege?

Yes, it really it really is. It is a it's a privilege. Um, gosh, yeah. I mean, yeah, it is a privilege. And it's one it's a privilege to also work toward.

How does one begin to work towards earnestness or how do you begin to work towards earnestness?

I mean, I'm still working on it, but I will say that the way I was working toward it is on the page and trying to figure out whether the difference between a necessary privacy or a sort of a cloak or a cloak that I might have because of fear in those are two. Those are very hard things, I think, to to tell apart. I have a friend who says that my book is my ID and I am the ego. Right.

That's the way she views us both. And and I would absolutely agree. And, you know, in real life, I'm a person I'd like to be entirely in control, to be a person who is kind of used to and maybe prefers to stand behind my art, you know, as opposed to right next to it. It's a nakedness that is required when you kind of put your work out there and do need to stand right next to it.

It's something that I honestly still adjusting to. Is there a moment or a part where you're like, oh, this is like this is me. I'm really laying it out there?

Oh, yeah. I mean, the difference is that I live in the real world and I've written a character, a black woman, who because I, you know, got to inhabit this fictional world, is afforded a freedom to express her rage and express her agency in a way that is more yeah, is more unbridled.

As we spoke through our screens, I could see into Raven's living room and she could see into mine. I can watch my boss's son tug on her sleeve. I can see my colleague's pyjamas and their childhood bedrooms. Nowadays, it is so hard to separate a version of a publicly facing self when I wear at home who I am in private has seeped into the way I present myself on my show. But I think this new mandatory earnestness redefines what earnestness is that it's not necessarily something childlike and innocent.

If we're considering earnestness, a form of sincerity, of true passions laid bare, then anger is earnest, too. So is the ability to say, you know what, I'm really going through it and I'm having a horrible day. This is all earnestness on a new public level, joy and rage, you know, earnestness.

Those earnest feelings are big feelings, you know, and and so they are to enact them, right. To to feel them to really surrender yourself to them means to surrender yourself to a real fallibility. And so that that is I think and what I'd want to add about it, which is that I think all of those things are linked in. All of those things are human.

In Luster, our hero, Eddie falls into an affair with an older white guy who is married but in an open relationship, and he chooses an extremely earnest location for their first date.

I'm very curious about how you came up with the idea of the date at Six Flags.

Where did that? Oh, boy. I mean, you know, I. I just. I love I do, you know, I do. I love amusement parks. I mean, I miss them. This is the first time, Eric and eating meat. And it was a way to kind of poke fun at at least that initial elephant in the room, which is this twenty three year discrepancy. You know, that he actually takes her to a place for children.

He sees how much Eric is enjoying himself and can exist in that joy in a totally uncomplicated way. After the break, Ediz date at Six Flags when Raven Lelani reads an excerpt from Lester. When it comes to eating healthier, it's not about what we take away from our bodies, but what we put in them, Sekara gets it.

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Are a dotcom slash the cut to get 20 percent off your first order. Saqqara dot com slash the cut. Hey, the listeners, I'm Rachel Thomas, CEO of Leanin. If you're interested in exploring the intersection of gender and culture. Check out our podcast. Tilton will dig into topics we are curious about, highlight people who inspire us to push for change. We'll talk about how women are expected to use humor and how they're challenging the status quo in the workplace.

We tend to joke around about things that we are serious about when we're scared, and I would love to encourage women to say how they really feel. We'll talk about different expressions of gender identity. Let your kid lead. Every child knows their gender. And if they don't know it exactly in that moment, it's because they're exploring. And if they're exploring, that's a wonderful thing.

And we'll share tips on everything from fighting burnout to raising boys who don't get stuck in the so-called sandbox. Subscribe to Tilted a lean podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. If you think you may be depressed or you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious, better help offers licensed online counselors who are trained to listen and help talk to your counselor and a private online environment at your own convenience. Better help. Counselors specialize in areas like family and relationship conflict, LGBTQ issues, self-esteem and more.

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Better help is an affordable option. And our listeners get 10 percent off your first month with discount code. The cut get started today at better help dotcom slash the cut. That's better HLT dotcom slash the cut. Talk to a therapist online and get help today. And now Lester by Raven Lelani. The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed at our desk during working hours, bathed in blue computer light, he is to processing a new bundle of microfiche.

And I'm downtown handling corrections for new laboratory detective manuscript. He tells me what he ate for lunch and asked if I can manage to take off my underwear in my cubicle without anyone noticing. His messages come with impeccable punctuation. He's fond of words like taste and spread. The empty textfield is full of possibilities. Of course I worry about it remoting into my computer or my Internet history warranting yet another disciplinary meeting with H.R. But the risk, the thrill of a third pair of unseen eyes, the idea that someone in the office with that sweet post lunch break optimism might come across this thread and see how tenderly Eric and I have built this private world.

In his first message, he points out a few typos in my online profile and tells me he has an open marriage. His profile pictures are candid and loose. A grainy photo of him asleep in the sand, a photo of him shaving taken from behind. It is his last photo that moves me the dirty tile in software session of steam, his face in the mirror stern with quiet scrutiny. I see the photo to my phone so I can look at it on the train.

Women look over my shoulder and smile and I let them believe he is mine. Otherwise I have not had much success with men. This is not a statement of self pity. This is just a statement of the facts. Here's a fact. I have great breasts which have warmed my spine. More facts. My salary is very low. I have trouble making friends and men lose interest in me when I talk. It always goes well. Initially when I talk to explicitly about my orientation or my rent, Eric is different.

Two weeks into our correspondence, he tells me about the cancer that ravaged half his maternal family. He tells me about an aunt he loved who made potions with fox hair and how she was buried with a cornhusk doll she made of herself. Still, he describes his childhood home lovingly the regressions of farmland between Milwaukee and Appleton, the yellow breasted chat's and tundra swans that would appear in his yard looking for seed. When I talk about my childhood, I only talk about the happy parts tape of Spice World.

I received my fifth birthday, the Barbie. I melted in the microwave when no one was home. Of course, the context of my childhood, the boy bands, the Lunchables, the impeachment of Bill Clinton only emphasizes our generational gap. Eric is sensitive about his age and about mine, and he makes a considerable effort to manage a twenty three year discrepancy. He follows me on Instagram and leaves lengthy comments on my posts. Retired Internet slang interspersed with earnest remarks about how the light falls on my face compared to the inscrutable advances of younger men.

It is a relief. We talk for a month before our schedules align. We try to meet earlier, but things always come up. This is just one way. His life is different from mine. There are people who count on him and sometimes they need him urgently. Between his abrupt cancellations, I realized that I need him to in a way that makes my dreams delirious. Expressions of thirst, long stretches of yellow desert cathedral hemmed in dripping moss.

By the time we set our first real date, I would have done anything. He wanted to go to Six Flags. We decided to go on a Tuesday when he rolls up in his white Volvo. I've only made it to the part of my pretty routine where I try to find the most appropriate laugh. I put on three dresses before I find the right one. I tie up my grades and line my eyes. There are dishes in the sink and a pervasive salmon smell in the apartment and I don't want him to think it has anything to do with me.

I put on a complex pair of underwear that is not so much underwear as a bundle of string and I stand before the mirror. I think to myself, you are a desirable woman. You were not a dozen girls in a skin casing outside. He's double parked. He leans against the car and remains like this. As I come out, his eyes bright and still his hair is darker than I expected. A black so opaque it looks blue. His face is almost obscenely symmetrical.

The one of his eyebrows is higher than the other, and it makes his smile seem a little smug. It is the second day of summer in all the cities. Powers have no sway over him. I reached for his hand. Try not to swallow my tongue and something feels strange. Of course there are nerves in person. He's a total daddy, his face alert and hard, softened only by the slight recession of his hair. But this strange feeling has nothing to do with that.

Nothing to do with me. Looking past his sensuous mouth and slightly askew nose for any indication that he is as nervous as I am. It is that it is eight fifteen a.m. and I feel happy I'm not on the L smelling someone's lukewarm pickles, wishing I were dead easy. I say extending my hand. I know, he says, his long fingers settling between mine too gently. I wanted to be more forward to fold him into an easy, extraverted hug.

But what happens is this limp handshake, this aversion of my eyes is unsurprising in immediate surrender of power and the. The worst part of meeting them in broad daylight, the part where you see him seeing you deciding in the split second whether any future cunnilingus will be enthusiastic or perfunctory, he opens the door and there is a fluffy blue dye hanging from the rearview mirror, a half eaten bag of jolly ranchers in the passenger seat. His correspondence online has been honest, full of his stuttering sincerity.

However, as we have already told the stories you might tell on a first date, it is harder to begin. He brings up the weather and then we are talking about climate change after a while of talking generally about burning to death. We pull into the park. It's hard not to be aware of an age discrepancy when you were surrounded by the most percoco trappings of childhood the Tweety Bird balloons, the plastic soulless eyes of the Tigers mascot. The defendants, as we enter the gates, feel the high fructose son of the park like an insult.

This is a place for children. He has taken me to a place for children. I watch his face for any indication that this may be a joke or a telling manifestation of his anxiety. But the mere 23 years I've spent on Earth, the age discrepancy doesn't bother me beyond the fact of older men having more stable finances and a different understanding of the clitoris. There is the potent drug of a keen power imbalance of being caught in the excruciating limbo between their disinterest and expertise, their panic at the world's growing indifference, their rage and adult failure funneled into the reduction of your body into gleaming elastic parts.

Except for him, this seems to be new territory, not simply to be out on a date with someone who is not his wife and decades younger, but to be out with a girl who happens to be black. I can feel it in how cautiously he says African-American, how he absolutely refuses to say the word black. As a rule, I try to avoid popping that dusky cherry. I cannot be the first black girl, a white man date.

I cannot endure the nervous renditions of backpacker rap, the conspicuous effort to be colloquial, the smugness of pink men and kente cloth as we make our way over to the lockers of father and son or vomiting behind a Bugs Bunny standee, I open the locker and there's a diaper inside. Eric sees it and calls over a janitor. Eric says he's sorry and the apology feels like it is not only about the diaper, but more about how this choice of location is turning out.

I feel bad about that. I feel bad that my first instinct is to manage his feelings instead of suggesting somewhere to go that we will both have to endure my attempt to prove over the course of this date that I am having a good time and that this is not your fault. A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assume the state would go well.

But everything is different. URL For one thing, I'm not as quick on my feet. There's no time to consider my words or to craft a clever response. And iOS notes. There is also the fact of body heat, the inarticulately parts of being close to a man, the sweet all thing underneath their cologne, the way it sometimes feels as if there were no whites to their eyes. A man's profound adrenal craziness, the tenuousness of his restraint.

I feel it on me and inside me like I'm being possessed. When we talked online, we both did some work to fill in the blanks. We filled them in optimistically with the kind of yearning that brightens and distorts. We an elaborate hypothetical dinners and we talked about the doctor's appointments we were afraid to make. Now, there were no blanks. And when he rubbed some black on my back, it is both too little and too much. Is this OK?

He asks his breath. Heart on the back of my neck. Uh huh, I say, trying not to make the contact into to more than it is. However, his hands are excellent. They are warm and wide and soft, and I have not been late in months. For a moment I'm sure I'm going to cry, which is not unusual because I cry often and everywhere, and most especially because of this one all garden commercial. I excuse myself and run to the bathroom where I look into the mirror and reassure myself that there are bigger things in the moment that I am in gerrymandering, genealogy, conglomerates on my cheek swabs the state.

Of course, there is still the business of trying to look sexy while hurting across the sky. Like most white people who eat beans in the woods. Undeterred by fresh biegel evidence of hungry bears, Erick finds his mortality in soft, meaty body of petty, incidental thing. I, on the other hand, am acutely aware of all the ways I might die. So when the sighing teenage park associate slaps my harness down and slides over to the lovers, I think of all my unfinished business, the court of Pistachio Gelato in my freezer, the one point five wanks left in my half dead vibrator, my Mr.

Rogers boxset. Eric's enthusiasm is infectious. After the first two rides, I'm enjoying myself. And not just because dying means I won't have to pay my student loans. He laces his fingers into mine and dragged me to the front, apparently serious enough about his park experience to have paid the extra fee to skip the line. I go to tie my shoelaces and return to find him talking to the Porky Pig mascot about. Entry level positions at the archive, we always need quality customer service, he says, pressing his phone number into Porky's Pink felt.

We bought the highest coaster in the park for the third time. He screams like it is the first. He really, truly screams. At first it is off putting. But as we scale the last track, I realized that I like it. I like it a lot. I can't decide if it's the dissonance the girl in Aceves inclination compared to his mask or my envy of his wonder, the glee in his terror, the willingness to experience a new what is familiar.

His joy is raw in a way that makes me feel like I can unzip my skin suit and show him all the ooze inside. But not yet. There is a sadness about his fervor, the way it feels slightly put on, as if he has something to prove. He looks over at me when we reach the top. The wind cards through his hair, behind his eyes, I see myself fractured into pieces. Suddenly it feels painful to be this ordinary, to be this open to him.

As he looks at me and pretends I'm not just a cheaper version of a fast Italian car. I wish every day could be like this, he says. When I reach the most terrifying part of the ride, when they hold you in midair and force you to anticipate the drop below us, the park is turning on its lights. All I want for him is to have what he wants. I want to be uncomplicated and undemanding. I want no friction between his fantasy and the person I actually am.

I want all that and I want none of it. I want the sex to be familiar and tepid for him to be unable to get it up, for me to be too open about my IBS so that we are bonded. A mutual consolation. I want us to fight in public and when we fight in private, I want him to maybe accidentally punch me. I want us to have a strong, fruitful birdwatching career, and I want us to find out that we have cancer at exactly the same time that I remember his wife, the Closter eases downward and we fall despite myself.

I have been thinking about his wife all day. I find myself hoping that she is a vocal participant in the neighborhood watch. It would also be reassuring if she lives completely still during sex. There is the possibility that she might be cool. She might truly be fine with her husband going out on a date with a girl who has 16 times more viable eggs, she might be limber, keyed into Venus, retrograde and inclined to use natural deodorant. A woman so unthreatened by old New York's women that she has given this newble whored a wholesale blessing to fuck her husband.

After a few more rounds, Eric and I head to a faux saloon with surprising abundance of liquor. It is the one restaurant in the park allowed to sell alcohol and above the bars. In neon rendition of Yosemite Sam's handlebar mustache, a waitress wearing a ten gallon hat tosses a couple of sticky menus on the table. She tells it the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to go right ahead and fuck ourselves.

Up until this moment, we have been writing to the day side by side and look at him directly and it almost hurts. His undivided attention is like a focus point of heat. Are you having a good time? He asks. Yeah, I think so, because I have to be honest, I'm having trouble reading you and I'm usually really great at that kind of thing. I finish my beer and try not to show how overjoyed I am that none of my need and loathing have come across.

You're kind of aloof, he says. And all the kids stacked underneath my trench coat rejoice. Aluf is a casual lean, a choice. It is not a girl in Bushwick looking clean a can of tuna. I'm an open book, I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I do for their legs. As they tried to leave my house, I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine saying I can be a beach read.

I can get rid of all these causes.

Please, I'll just revise by. Parker is our show's lead producer, editorial support from Allison Barrenger. This episode was engineered and scored by Jason Valerio special thanks to Corrine's A Cadenas and Sensitising Catz. Stella Buckby and Nashat Carla are the show's executive producers. The cut is made possible by the team at New York magazine. Subscribe today to support their work at the dot.com subscribe. I'm Avery Gettleman. Thanks for listening.