This novel is for John, without whom I would still be writing fantastical accounts of beasts, magick, and women allowed to smoke in public.

This novel is for Friederich, who had access to a reputable publisher for male writers and, with the pomp of his cravat, saved my precious manuscript from becoming a worthless serial, installing it to proper jacketed status with a mostly self-explanatory title.

To dear Roderick: you knew that vampiric fiction would never sell.

To Gideon, who convinced me that the class system made for a better villain than a one-legged highway bandit in this novel about the human condition.

For Gilbert, who always knew that I was better than the tight plotting required of a successful Gothic novel, and could instead be persuaded to fictionalize my life into an easily digestible tome for women readers.

For Fred: I followed your advice to write what I know, and that turned out to be mostly just stuff about sitting in the parlour, waiting for something to happen.

Liz Watson’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

There is no article of male clothing more maligned in contemporary online culture than the fedora. Once the favored hat of gangsters and sexy archaeologists, around 2011 the fedora came to be internet shorthand for a Certain Kind of Dude: a basement-dwelling, Cheeto-eater who loathes his contemporaries and seeks refuge in TV and video games. A guy who believes in the friend-zone, Richard Dawkins, and sexualizing young cartoon characters. A jerk, but a specific kind of jerk.

However, I’ve noticed that recently the fedora has been used as a net term for all kinds of creeps. This is unfair to the fedora, which isn’t THAT bad a hat objectively and shouldn’t have to shoulder that burden. For the sake of the fedora’s reputation and expanding our own misandrist vocabulary, I present to you the Leather Golf Hat.

The equally-loathsome ENFP to the Fedora’s INTJ.

(A caveat: there is one man who looks fantastic in a leather golf hat. That man is Samuel L. Jackson. Thinking you look like Samuel L. Jackson in a leather golf hat is as foolish as thinking you look like Humphrey Bogart in a fedora. If you wear a leather golf hat, the odds are you look like a child’s thumb with an acorn top stuck on it.)

So many reasons! Here are some.

If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. He, and it will be a “he,” will attempt to catch your eye from the other side of the train. You will pointedly ignore him, concentrating even harder on the book in your hand, boring holes into the paper and yet not taking in a single written word. Time will pass, and then he will approach you. You will hear his shoes squeaking as he makes his way closer.

Maybe he’ll sit down. Maybe he’ll just loom over you like an irritating specter. And he’ll ask you, despite every facet of your body language screaming that you do not want to be approached, what he feels is not just an appropriate question, but one that deserves a warm response: “What are you reading?”

By the time he asks this question, you have already lost. You have failed in your quest to get from point A to point B undisturbed. This stranger, whoever he may be that day, will always be a threat to you and your peace, and books are a solid defense, but you must pick your weapon wisely. Like brightly colored beetles in the wild, the book-loving traveler can use her choice of reading material to give a clear message to anyone watching her: “stay away.” Here are some books that do just that.

A Book that is Not a Book, but a Household Object

Try once, instead of bringing a book on the bus, bringing a stapler. Really read that stapler. Examine its contours. Think about exactly how much effort was made to make this object that exists to bind other thinner objects together. NEVER take your eyes off the stapler. Form a relationship with the stapler. LOVE it.

Do you think you’ll get people coming up to you asking you why the hell you’re staring so hard at a stapler? No. No you won’t. Because they will sense that the stapler is more important to you than anything they could ever say.

Feminist Literature

There is something to be said for carrying around a copy of The Feminine Mystique with you wherever you go. It’s like carrying around a cross to ward off demons.