My Sandwich, My Choice
It's the mayo, for me!
Hi friends,
I make sandwiches and chat about sexism, misogyny, reproductive rights and other topics that interest and affect me on TikTok and Instagram. Maybe that’s how you found me? Well, hello! This is my first-ever newsletter on Substack. I am so delighted you’re here. Thank you for coming.
Here’s a sandwich vid that really touched a nerve this week 😬 :
What am I serving up with this Substack? If you’re hungry, I’ll have some delicious sandwich recipes for you (there’s one below!). If you’re feeling white-hot rage about some misogynistic BS, I’ll commiserate. If you need an essay to affirm your increasingly dystopian world view as neo-fascist movements continue their rise around the world… I’ll link to a bunch, and sometimes I’ll try my hand at writing one myself. And if you want recommendations for cool meetups, and gorgeous art, and great music, and thrilling books, and other things to fill up your soul so you can go punch fascists (metaphorically speaking!), I’ll have those too, every week.
Here’s what My Sandwich, My Choice will be:
Recipes, news, and cool shit you’ll like, if you’re into feminism, civil rights, bodily autonomy, that kind of stuff. At least, that’s how I’m going to start out, and then, who knows what’ll happen? We could all be living in off-the-grid communal spaces after Elon shuts down the Internet after the election next year. I am decidedly not a conspiracy theorist (I just wrote an article about it), but hey, doesn’t that feel like more of a possibility than you ever thought possible?
Ok *ahem* ABOUT ME ugh
A while back, I wrote an essay about sexism. I’m a freelance writer — I was the culture editor for HIGH TIMES for a stretch — and I’ll dig into pretty much anything anyone wants to pay me to write about.
My friend Jon Cappetta, the VP of content at HT, had started a column called W.E.I.R.D.O.S., which stands for Weed Enthusiast (and) Insider Rants, Diatribes & Original Stories. He invited me to contribute a WEIRDOS piece, with no parameters other than those laid out in the acronym for the series. So I wrote about sexism in the cannabis industry.
I tried to keep it light, and tongue in cheek, while also saying, hey, fuckers, legal weed is a brand spanking new industry, and we get to decide what it looks like as we build it. It doesn’t have to look like every other corporate borg-dom in America. We can do away with sexism, for starters, at the very least, right? Here’s an excerpt:
When I started writing about weed, and working at Cannabis Cups around the country, plenty of women were crushing it in the industry. It was a heady, optimistic time. In 2015, Newsweek published a piece titled “How Legal Marijuana Could Be the First Billion-Dollar Industry Not Dominated by Men.” I worked with many of those women, and I include myself when I say that we were buoyed up by the possibility of the Green Rush being a fair and equitable space. We believed that the Brave New World of Weed wasn’t going to be dominated by the usual players, and we wouldn’t have to fight for seats at the table; we were going to build the table together, and pull up any kind of chair/throne/beanbag we wanted (click the link for outdated stoner stereotype LOLs).
But women haven’t gained ground in the cannabis industry; along with minority executives and owners, we’ve lost it. Last year, the percentage of women holding executive positions in weed fell below the average of other U.S. industries. “Industry experts suggest that competitive markets tend to favor businesses with white men in ownership and leadership positions, primarily because of their established access to capital,” MJBiz reported. “More executives from mainstream sectors are opting into the cannabis industry as a new opportunity, accelerating the increase of white men in power positions.”
And wow, some of those guys are big mad at women! Just last week the CEO of an Oklahoma company was so rattled by a sales rep from a cannabis job platform including her pronouns in her email signature that he replied: “I don’t communicate with ignorant c*nts that cannot figure out what a woman is. You’re a she/her/hers? Please die so God can rectify his mistake.”
Whoo, that fucking guy! I was writing from an honest, fairly furious place, and I hit send on it without even considering that it might generate an absolutely unhinged response from the manosphere. But that’s exactly what it did. It got hundreds of comments on Instagram, with a ton of them saying shit like, “Why do women think they dont have equal rights wasnt this resolved in the early 70’s” and “STFU and make me a sandwich.”
Shut up, and make me a sandwich.
This was absolutely baffling to me. And it was repeated, over and over: “Make me a sandwich and then we’ll talk.” “This b*tch needs to make me a sandwich.” “Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” So I hopped into the comments and told the dudes I was so very sorry to hear that they could not make themselves sandwiches. “I didn’t realize sandwich impotence was a thing!" I replied to them, chuckling to myself. Of course, this did not help in the least, and after a couple of hours of trading poisonous little barbs with the trolls, I left feeling slimy and exhausted.
So I did a little digging into the saying “make me a sandwich.” You can read about it here. No surprises, it’s “an internet meme that men employ to annoy, insult, or dismiss women. It makes reference to the stereotype that women belong only in domestic spaces, such as the kitchen.”
It’s the mayo for me
Fast forward a bunch, because this is TL;DR, but I wanted to make something around the whole sandwich idea. I’m an actor, which feels a little weird to say because I haven’t acted full-time in a while, but I really wanted to make it into a theater piece. And then, one afternoon on a sparkly hike with my friend Lauren, as I was mulling over how to construct my scintillating one-woman show in which I made sandwiches onstage while talking about misogyny etc., Lauren turned to me and said, “That sounds like a TikTok.” She also added some wise words about how I needed to adapt or die when I objected. I went home that night and made my very first sandwich.
That was in February. I’ve been posting two or three sandwiches a week since then. It’s been a massive education in both sandwich making, and learning about just how bonkers social media is. The bros mostly hate my vids, which drives engagement. Some people say nice things, which feels good. Sometimes folks get into it in the comments and a video will really pop off, which is its own kind of wild rush. And many kind folks have asked for the recipes.
A 10 Year Old Is Not a Woman BLT
So, for my first Substack post, here’s a sandwich that I made in response to the news that an anti-abortion activist referred to a 10-year-old rape victim as a woman when she was testifying at an Ohio hearing aimed at blocking an abortion rights ballot measure from getting a statewide vote this November.
At one of these hearings on Tuesday, Laura Strietmann, head of Cincinnati Right to Life, addressed the gutting case of a 10-year-old rape victim in the state who was forced to travel to Indiana for abortion last July, because Ohio’s ban doesn’t include a rape exception. “While a pregnancy might have been difficult on a 10-year-old body, a woman’s body is designed to carry life. That is a biological fact,” Strietmann said, referring to a child victim as a woman for political convenience.
The topic is awful. But the sandwich was delicious! Here’s the video, and the Juicy BLT recipe, doctored a bit for a solo sandwich. Thank you all for sticking around this long. And please tell your friends if you think they’d dig My Sandwich, My Choice! We’ll be here weekly. - MJ ❤️🥪
INGREDIENTS for 1 sandwich
4 slices thick-cut smoked or unsmoked bacon, or 8 slices thin-cut bacon
heirloom tomato (beefsteak or vine tomatoes work too)
red wine vinegar
extra-virgin olive oil
flaky sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
2 slices good white bread, heavily toasted
mayonnaise
lettuce (butter is nicest, romaine works too)
Make Yourself a Sandwich
Fry bacon in a large skillet over high heat until golden brown, about 4 minutes.
While bacon cooks, slice tomato crosswise into thin rounds. Transfer to a plate and marinate with red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper.
Spread both pieces of toast generously with mayonnaise.
Spread the tomatoes and some of their marinade on the toast. Top with lettuce.
Lay the bacon on the tomato. Slap the other piece of bread with mayo on top. Squeeze to close, cut in half and eat with your eyes closed to shut out the patriarchy while feeling the deep gratification of your delicious sandwich, which you made for yourself.
Last licks 😋
Follow Andrea Guzzetta for gorgeous paintings, great memes, and general beautification of the inside of your brain. She’s also very fucking funny.
yessss I can’t wait for more 👏👏👏
We have a commercial panini grill too. We hardly ever pull it out. You make us want us to give it permanent space on our counter!