It would happen like this: I’d get an email at 4:15 p.m. that said my roommate was looking at porn—along with a pixelated image of penetration.
We were both members of an accountability group at Southwest Baptist University called Dangerous Men. In fact, he’s the one who introduced me to it. If you were in this group, you were not supposed to watch porn. At all. Everyone in the group had an accountability partner, and you’d have to share your masturbation habits with them. Whenever you were tempted, you were supposed to text your accountability partner and be like, Dude, I’m horny right now. I need you to distract me.
My roommate was my accountability partner, and I was his. While I relied on parental controls, he installed a program called Covenant Eyes onto his computer. The program records your screen, and if you ever watch something that the program thinks is porn—even a YouTube video featuring a person showing too much skin—it takes a blurred-out screenshot and sends it to your accountability partner. Even pastors had Covenant Eyes on their work computers, which were often kept in the house of the Lord. Didn’t they have enough self-control not to jack off at work?
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One of the best lines in 9 to 5 occurs when Dolly Parton, as secretary Doralee Reynolds, tells her corrupt boss that she carries a gun in her purse. “Up to now, I've been forgiving and forgetting because of the way I was brought up,” she says. “But I'll tell you one thing: If you ever say another word about me or make another indecent proposal, I'm gonna get that gun of mine and I'm gonna change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot!”
Now, I’m not advocating that Labor Day is about threatening your boss with a gun. But during the one day on the calendar when workers finally get to lift up their feet and enjoy a day off for once, you’re allowed to fantasize about whatever you want. And if you’re looking for a way to pass the time with a good film, well, we found nine Labor Day movies below about workers’ rights that just might make you feel like you’re not the only one clocking in day in and day out.
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Whether you’re just beginning your watch-buying journey or you’re a seasoned collector, there’s a healthy chance that you have serious respect for one brand: Seiko.
Based in Tokyo, Seiko makes watches and clocks in thousands of styles, colors, complications, and sizes, all at prices that have proven affordable to millions around the world. From soldiers to students to office workers, from athletes to doctors to journalists, people love this brand for its potent mix of affordability, utility, and variety.
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Midterm elections are strange and powerful beasts. Every couple of years, we get to legally overthrow our government by electing the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. This can—and often does—change the nature of our nation.
A number of midterms were important pivot points in history. Some were acts of contrition, attempts at redemption. Others were nationwide circuses, vehicles of mass entertainment. They can exacerbate into terminal the historical illness known as the Second Term Plague, whereby for one reason or another the American public gets bored with the president it elected twice and, knowingly or unknowingly, begins to rid itself of him. This infirmity has overwhelmed the current president, even though his first and second terms were separated by four years and even though his second term has been everything but boring.
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I’m a uniform dresser. That’s my life. I used to fight it because I didn’t want to concede to dressing like every other kid in my Georgia town. But growing up for me was realizing there’s nothing wrong with regressing, nothing wrong with dressing like your dad. Just because I wear the same boots, same jeans, same polo every day doesn’t mean I’m adopting a Steve Jobs 100 of the same black turtleneck asceticism, nor does it mean I look like I’m on the SEC fraternity guy to Sea Island dad pipeline. Instead, it means that I’ve developed blind loyalty for the brands that fit said uniform.
The cowboy boots are Lucchese. The jeans are Wrangler. The jean jacket is RRL. The polos are Lacoste. But the polos found a challenger when Hanover came across my desk. The brand’s raison d’être—to “make everyday essentials ... produced in Los Angeles with nothing priced over $300”—piqued my interest. But what got me really interested was seeing that the piqué polo is only $110, exactly on par with the two big-name brands with recognizable horse or crocodile left chest logos. And once I held the shirt, wore it, I was sold.
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Infidelity makes me remember things. The details that expand to fill my life (my upcoming performance reviews, the aches and pains of training, the recovery of my 401(k)) and the ones that deaden it (my guilt, my smug self-satisfaction, my fake epiphanies about my progress in this life)—all of that drops away when I look down at the naked spine of an unfamiliar woman, twisting slightly in the late-afternoon sunlight streaming onto the sheets of a Hampton Inn in some nameless suburb. This is the most absolute choice I can make. I am there on my own. Against every code, rule, and set of mores I pretend to obey. Against better judgment, against every lesson of hindsight and every shard of wisdom that comes with age, I have no regrets in that moment, because I am naked, or without pants, and I have chosen to be there. I have voted by my presence, declared it, and I feel the blood moving in me again. So it’s the blood. That’s who I am. That’s why men cheat.
People always say men cheat because they can. It’s easy to cheat, that part is true. There’s so little evidence left behind. The checklists are easy—you have to wash here and there, you have to enlist the sympathy of the woman you are fucking, you have to control your time and select your venue. But by and large, infidelity is remarkably easy to hide. More often than not—more often than any man will admit—there is absolutely no consequence. So yes, that freedom exists. A man can.
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