Sideswipe: March 10: Dark op-shop finds

There's one in every office.

Photo / Supplied

Taken to HR

You know if you are called to the HR department, you know you’ve stepped out of line, big time. “I once was told there was a high-level (manager and up) meeting being held about me … on account of my emails being written too well. I can write quick, well-worded emails, and someone in upper management thought that I must have been spending too much time writing my emails, possibly as a means of appearing to be superior to others.”

Manliness is all in the jaw

A growing number of men are paying vast sums to have their jaws broken and reshaped in the hope that a manlier mandible might transform them into alphas or Chads. This is a real cosmetic procedure. After splitting a patient’s lower jaw, upper jaw and chin respectively, surgeons will bolt the pieces of bone back together, restructuring – and advancing – the jawline. GQ magazine spoke to someone getting the surgery and his reasons were that he felt himself falling behind his “better-looking” friends with women and the cold reality of his online dating match count. These ideas are perpetuated in the dark corners of the web. Looksmax.org is an online forum in which men strive to achieve their “aesthetic potential”. Looksmaxing is a facet of the manosphere, that swamp of online communities that’s often a potent mix of toxic masculinity, men’s rights and misogyny.

We are living in a cynical world and I am a cynical girl

In Ontario, Canada, police were investigating a “suspicious older male” who apparently pulled over his car and offered a young boy a box of chocolates. When the boy refused the gift, the man insisted, saying he could pass on the gift to his mother. Later, in a news release, police said they’d discovered that the man was motivated by Random Acts of Kindness Day and handed out chocolates to people of varying ages for those reasons.