Ask The Flytrap: Mother, I Crave Violence

Welcome to your new favorite advice column from your favorite feminist journalism collective! New editions are published every Wednesday. Read on for the drama, the tea, and the commiseration—and if you want to submit a question, scroll on down to the bottom of this post for more info.

Let's get into it:

Dear Ask The Flytrap,

How would you avenge someone who has wronged you and your community? Let’s assume this person totally deserves whatever major or minor life struggles you can devise but you still have ethics against things like calling the cops or threatening their safety. How can I make someone’s day worse?

— Vengeful Spirit

Howdy, Vengeful Spirit!

We had such a lively discussion about this on Slack and so many of us wanted to weigh in that we're featuring advice recommendations from several members of The Flyteam, since we have a thirst for revenge, a deep well of creativity, and an overabundance of Scorpios.

s.e. says: Good news, my family motto is “revenge is a dish best served cold,” because those who wrong me (and ESPECIALLY hurt my people) should spend the rest of their lives sleeping with one eye open, wondering when It’s going to happen. Ideally, It should already be happening, in slow, subtle ways that make their lives worse but not necessarily in a way they can categorically point to.

My friend Emily always says “put shrimp in the curtain rods (no one ever checks the curtain rods)” but I’m more of a peanut butter in the vents (not smelly, like tuna, but will attract pests over time) kinda guy. I’m assuming neither of these are options because you probably don’t have legal access to their home or workplace (if you do…knock yourself out, you can cram a lot of those little bay shrimp into a curtain rod). 

You gotta get some good low-stakes, but very annoying, hexes going.

Think: may your quiche always be raw in the middle (vegan? No problem, may your lentils always be undercooked); may you be doomed to strip every screw you set a tool to; may you fumble every attempt at anything ever again; may your car always smell hauntingly and nonspecifically of dog shit (non-driver? Sounds like this might be a living room problem). You know this person better than I do, so you know what’s going to be most disruptive to their routine, and, critically, most erosive to their sense of self and the things they find joy in. Proud of their lawn? Bummer about all those dead spots. Think they’re hot shit at croquet? They’re about to whiff every game. The fates will take care of this one for you and you don’t need to lift a finger. 

Beyond these, think about hitting them in possibly the best place: Their networks. If you poison the well badly enough, their social, professional, and personal lives will crumble BUT you gotta do it without leaving any fingerprints. A whisper network can go a long way when it comes to taking out a missing stair, if you're picking up what I'm laying down.

Nicole says: Do you have their mailing address? In case you do, buy loads of glitter and loads of differently sized envelopes. Start filling up the envelopes with glitter and sending them sporadically through out the next two to three years. Don't send them too close together, as they'll remember and thrown them out before opening. Try to space them out, get different people to write the address, etc. Glitter never comes off things. Let's hope they have carpet!

Melissa says: Nicole, glitter in the mail can backfire! Years ago, I may have been in the middle of two feuding ex-friends where one sent glitter mail to the other, hoping to fuck up her life for at least a week while she found glitter everywhere. Unfortunately for the glitter bomber, the recipient was a crafter and opened the envelope over her desk where she was able to salvage it. She laughed it off and made lemonade out of lemons, or whatever the glitter and crafting equivalent would be.

In recent months, I seem to have irked the wrong person, because I keep getting emails from gun-related places for the first time in my decades on the internet. It's not just from one place, and every time I report it as spam and unsubscribe, something from some new guns and ammo sort of list winds up finding its way into my inbox. It's like playing second amendment Whack-A-Mole, and I'm tired. I hope my mysterious nemesis is happy, and you can find inspiration for what to do should you have their email address.

Gentle readers: Got some...legal...and ethical...revenge suggestions of your own? We'd love to hear from you in the comments, because we know you little fiends are every bit as diabolical and scheming as we are. (But don't tell us about anything you did that was illegal!)

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