That's What He Said

Satire by ANDREW PRIDGEN  |  @andrew_pridgen

With so much emphasis on women taking charge in society (and in the home, in the workplace …and, in other places!) this space, this month, is dedicated to the men who are out there breaking the mold and doing what men were meant to do: pretending to work while completing the bare minimum of parenting duties as they remind everyone over and over and over again that they completed a mundane task (like giving a bath to a child) within the last several months (years?), and “help” around the home enough to fuck things up and give up.

We are proud to announce the honorees for Sisu Magazine’s first-annual ‘Men in Business’ Awards, compiled by contributor Andrew Pridgen.

Doug Hemble
After working several years as an admin for Sunrise Title Company, Doug got his Real Estate license shortly after his second child was born. He worked on selling several planned communities in the area, including Chatterly Court, One Johnson Lane, and The Meadows on Clarke. But matching like-minded couples with their forever homes wasn’t nearly enough. Currently, he is patent-pending a new kind of device clip, a fanny pack-like holster that can carry up to two smartphones and an energy bar slung around the backside of the hip. He says it helps him “carry, without inconveniencing.”

“Regular device clips,” Doug explains, “are often worn in the front and I always felt myself slicing as a result. Also, it wasn’t the only thing prohibiting me from ‘hitting true’—a phone too close to my junk affected my swimmers and we couldn’t get pregnant with our third for like, months.” Dubbed “The Stroker,” he plans to go on Shark Tank to  pitch the holster, which also comes in a hemp blend “for the eco-conscious among us.” Whether working a deal on the course, harassing the servers over an artisanal cocktail, helping install a car seat, or checking in on what the Points Guy says about the Marriott-Starwood merger, Doug Hembler is “making a difference, one deal, one swing, one guy at a time.”

Matt Harn
Mat and his wife, Krystin, relocated to Southern California in 2015 from Seattle. While in the Emerald City, he was rooted in the world of tech start-ups and had much success—including selling a Spanx for men brand that both “shaped and enhanced” male genitalia and creatin an interactive app that helped you and your dog play simple games like Checkers and Sorry! during the workday. “We were leaving our Goldens at home for 10-12 hours, this was a way for us to interact.” Inspired by his four daughters and coordinating their busy volleyball schedules via Post-Its, Mat spun up “PrntPLNR,” a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that simply manages busy households. “We have SaaS for all types of businesses from health and wellness to real estate to any type of sales or investment banking, so why not one for the home?” From grocery lists to scheduling date nights to who gets to hold the Apple TV remote, PrntPLNR does it all. Mat and Krystin—who is CEO and his #ladyboss-4lyfe—say that once they were able to start doing drip campaigns to remind daughters Blakeley, Madysen, McKenlee, and Brigina to put down their devices (after the parents received the notification on their devices) and come pick up their Uber Eats, the family “really got closer, or at least did things at almost the same time.”

Rhett Warren
Profoundly driven and a perfectionist by nature, Rhett has built a robust Mancave or He-shed decorating business after taking several years off to breed and raise French Bulldogs. It started with helping re-purpose a neighbor’s failed tiny home trailer into his own private space. He sold everything and tried to do that Away We Go slash #vanlife thing where they travel around the country and find a perfect place to live, which resulted in his wife meeting and falling for some high-end rental car fleet owner in Scottsdale. So he came back and started over. He still had the home on wheels, but it really needed re-doing.

Rhett’s custom spaces go beyond “beer signs and favorite team pennants.” He says he really tries to channel a man’s heritage for these important places. “Most of us come from a lineage where our ancestors committed some kind of genocidal atrocity or at least spent their whole lives suppressing those not born into privilege, so I try to celebrate that,” he says. An amateur collagist and avid scrapbooker, Rhett says he recently completed a “Revenge Mural” of every Tinder Swipe Right a client had for a month with x’d out eyes. “I have to admit, that one was a little creepy, but no creepier than mounting a 180-year-old rifle that a guy said his great-great-great-grandpa used to ‘kill Indians, buffalo, and the occasional bear from aboard a fast-moving train.’”

Sterling Brans
Sterling, a longtime champion of men’s rights with a robust following on Reddit, wanted to “force” people to consider what it’s like for American men who have to jump through multiple hoops and regulations just to access to their own healthcare and reproductive rights. “I just thought, we spend so much time on women and their one egg per month. But what this is about is being forced to release millions of my guys down the shower drain every day.”

Sterling’s first book, a top seller in Amazon’s Cryptofascist-white supremacist-self-help-cisgender-Easter Bunny-costume-paw-fetish category, Let’s Give the Boy a Hand, was also blurbed by his own alter-ego, “an actual Tucker Carlson impersonator.”

From turning vitriol into a  cottage industry and bringing to light the fact that men really are the fucking worst, Sterling says “I ended up using this fucked-up system of ignorance that has proliferated in fascist-leaning times of misinformation and hate to attempt to bilk money from the public because the numbers are still there for men to exist. But there’s no real reason for it at this point if you think about it. I’m just trying to accelerate that.”

Mason Hamilton 
After being turned down for a job as a Walmart greeter, Mason blogged about it on his Tumblr before it was shut down for the majority of its content. “Most of the stuff on there that wasn’t CFNM was about having three advanced degrees and being unable to secure full-time minimum wage work,” he says. “I’d been driving Lyft for a year and a half but ended up getting stabbed with a pen by this hungover dude on the way to the airport. I think he was still drunk and crying about his marriage being over or something.” The pen stab was “only in the shoulder” Mason says. “It was like that scene in Forrest Gump where he gets shot and says, ‘Something bit me.’—god what a terrible movie.” A labor attorney reached out to Mason after he read the blog “for whatever reason” and they filed a class-action suit against the retail giant for “Reverse Age Discrimination.”

“The guy,” Mason says, “was a total hack and asked for like a hundred-and-something million, so I think the actual settlement was for four or five and he took something like 80 percent, so now  I’m in another lawsuit to get that back and that’s drained most of what I got, but oh, well. That’s how it goes.” Mason says he’s currently putting all that behind him and trying to get a job as a docent at a hotel or an office park, “Without elaborating, with my background, it’s too tough to get even a volunteer job at a museum, so I’m turning to the private sector. If I could lead tours at, say, an airport hotel and just kind of make things up, I think there’s a market for that. People need some kind of human connection now. Everything’s just so fractured and it seems more and more like it’s being done on purpose—though I can’t prove anything.”