What happens when your politics flinch at your own work

 

What Turns Men On.

It came in like so many briefs do — breezy, provocative, dressed in the language of engagement metrics. A sex column, ghostwritten for a content creator. She’s charismatic, controversial, and sometimes brilliant in ways her audience doesn’t always credit. My job, as ever, was to help shape the narrative: make it punchy, marketable, on-brand. Standard fare for a Friday at the office.  

So, blinking cursor at the ready? And go. 

Only, it didn't flow. In fact, I tripped over the first word. 

My problem? The magazine's rationale in the brief. The editor framed the topic as a public service. A map for men, who are lost in the uncertainty of #MeToo, the 4B movement, Epstein documentaries, and more recently Netflix's Adolescence. According to the brief, men — scared, confused, horny, adrift in a changing social landscape  — need a woman to tell them what they desire is "normal". 

Not a therapist, not a partner. And not just any woman -  an Content Creator and former porn star. Because who better to guide them than the women whose entire persona is built on being desired? 

That woman ist not me - at least not entirely. 

I’m just the ghostwriter, the women offstage, who makes somte things sound great, who cuts the noise and puts pen to paper when necessary. I trade in perception — which means I often work at the intersection of power, media, and identity. 

But this exercise in roleplay stopped me cold. 

Not because it was especially crass - sex sells even -, but because it asked me to upold a narrative that should have long been put to bed. Because it asked me to ignore every statistic and my own lived reality.  

Because it asked me to ignore every statistic and my own lived reality.

It asked me to soothe, not question. To use a woman’s body — or in this case, her brand — as a balm for male confusion, and to let that confusion stand in for vulnerability. To write a script where the man reading feels seen in his discomfort, but never confronted by the reasons it exists.

And that’s where the bind tightens.

You see, when you work in PR — reputation-shaping kind — you become fluent in compromise. You learn how to walk the line between what the public wants to hear and what the client needs to say. You learn how to spin ideology into tone of voice. You know when to soften a blow, and when to let it land. You start to believe that if you play the long game, bending the truth slightly in the service of something bigger, you’re still on the right side of things.

But every so often, a brief like this lands and reminds you: this isn’t just strategy. This is cosply, it's ideology dressed up.

Because what this piece ultimately asked for was reassurance. Not growth. Not reckoning. Not change. Reassurance for a demographic that’s never gone without it. The whole frame rests on a single, well-insulated idea: men are confused, and it’s a woman's job  — to help them feel okay about their sexuality again. 

We’ve seen this before. After every gain, there’s backlash. Not necessarily overt hostility, not angry men’s rights demonstrations (although the is that too), most of the time it's, a persistent tug back toward the status quo. A re-centering of the male ego as a site of injury that must be tended to. The narrative morphs: feminism isn’t wrong, it’s just gone too far. Men are scared. Help them out.

That doesn't sit right. 

Because I think it matters who gets to be confused and who just gets told they’re too much, too angry, too political — again. 

Maybe it would have been brave to say no. Maybe it would have been the right choice to say not to this assignment. In reality, not many people have the luxury to pick and choose. 

I wrote the piece. Carefully. Cleverly. I shaped it so it wouldn’t draw blood. I wrapped contradiction in polish, made it just empowering enough to pass. Because that’s the job. The client expects it. The editor expects it. The system rewards it.

But the cursor blinked longer than usual that day in an attempt to formulate something that’s palliative care for a dated version of masculinity.

This wasn’t a crisis of content. It was a crisis of conscience.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: when you work in PR, you don’t just reflect the culture — sometimes you launder it. You decide which compromises are strategy and which are surrender. And sometimes, the very skills that make you good at your job are the ones that let you rationalize away your politics, line by polished line.

I don’t have a clean answer. 

That’s the nature of a bind. But I know this: if we keep telling stories that soothe male anxiety at the expense of equality, we don’t just delay progress — we rewrite it to flatter the wrong protagonists.

And on a Friday - after a crazy week - it's utterly exhausting to make male insecurity look like vulnerability, and female labour — emotional, intellectual, erotic — look like help. It's tiring to packgage patriarchy in the soft velvet of understanding, to make it perform well. 

And worst of all: Reading the finished product, noboday will know.

No reader will see the discomfort behind the sentences. No editor will clock the hours I spent trying to reconcile the voice I was writing in with the one in my head. Not even the client will question the framing, because the numbers will look good. It’s clean. It’s clever. It’s on brand. It's what I get paid for. 

Yet, here I am. 

Still at my desk.
Still in the bind.
Still writing — not for the brief, not for the brand — but as proof:
That I noticed.
That this piece left a mark.
That doing the job well isn’t always the same as doing it right.