INTRODUCTION
Heyyy, I’m Drew!
If you already know me, it’s most likely from my TikTok, where I’m known as “Baba Yaga” to misogynists online. Or put another way, just like a heat-seeking missile, I target awful men who attack marginalized people on the internet for no reason and I never miss. Judging from their reactions, which range from bigoted attacks about my looks to actual death threats, I usually get the sense this is the first time these men have been taken to task for their comments. FYI, terrible men will degrade women and then fold like a lawn chair when I respond to them with silly-ass retorts like noting that they’re “built like a Lego.” That’s on them. I want them to know there are consequences to treating people in ways that are harmful or problematic on a public platform, and so that’s what I like to think of myself as: a tangible consequence.
I know you might be thinking:… So? How did a handful of short videos cackling right in the face of unfunny, misogynistic men lead to an audience of over nine million strong on socials, and the opportunity to write the book you currently hold in your hands?
It’s because people, but especially women and femmes, are tired. I was tired. I was also mad seeing how life has forced women and femmes to center men even if it felt wrong and put us in uncomfortable or harmful positions. Like having to be cordial to a man who wouldn’t leave me alone, because of the very real and valid fear that he might act violently toward me, all the way to being denied opportunities at work by a female supervisor because she had been taught to believe that there wasn’t enough room for both of us in a space dominated by men. And when being mad no longer felt like enough … I decided to start laughing instead. Humor, I realized, was the gift I could share with every woman and femme out there who was over it just as much as I was.
If comparing these dudes’ teeth to the doors of a haunted house could bring at the very least a snap of joy into someone’s day, while possibly helping a few others question why these men have any say in how they feel about themselves, then I would gladly crack jokes all day long. My content found its audience in people who were over having to grin and bear men’s bullshit, and the community I have built on my platforms has been a safe space ever since for everyone who is tired of holding space for misogynistic men. I don’t just validate their experiences; I validate their anger. I tell them it’s okay if you want to be mad, it’s okay if you want to yell back, and it’s okay if you want to be a bitch to men who are disrespectful to you or anyone around you. You have every right to feel the way that you do and express it in whatever way suits you best.
For every man who’s had a meltdown after being faced with even 0.0001 percent of the shit that the rest of us have to face every day, there’s someone like the woman who came up to me on a beach in Mexico with tears in her eyes to share that she was wearing a bathing suit for the first time in her life because of my content defending fat and plus-size women. Or the messages I’ve gotten from people telling me that I gave them the courage to finally report their assault. Or the woman in her fifties who left an abusive marriage after learning to assert herself from watching my videos. And I often think about the trans woman who told me that watching my battles against bigots online has kept her on this earth longer than she planned to be.
These kinds of stories inspire me to keep my foot on the metaphorical neck of misogynists online. If my dragging the assorted alpha males, gym bros, and hypermasculine podcast hosts of TikTok was what it took for my audience to find their voice, then I would be honored to take the wrath of millions of terrible men over and over again. Every single time.
* * *
Funny enough, all of this started with landing what I thought was my dream job.
I’d set my heart on working in sports entertainment ever since I was a kid watching my dad during his run with the Arizona Cardinals with my mom and big sister, Deison. As a proud Samoan, I found that professional football was the only stage I could reliably look to growing up for representation in the media (seriously, you can look it up—the Samoan community in America produces a remarkable number of professional football players per capita), and even then they were obviously only Samoan men. I wanted to grow up and be the representation I so desperately wished for—like a Samoan Michele Tafoya working as a sideline reporter on the field.
After I graduated from college with degrees in communications and sports journalism, it took two years of constantly applying for jobs and eight rounds of interviews for two separate roles before I finally landed the entry-level position that would get my foot in the door. In the spring of 2019, I was hired by the organization of my dreams as part of a grassroots initiative to boost female football fans’ participation on their social media. Did the job include health insurance or any benefits? No. Was it technically classified as part-time though I had to sometimes come in five days a week and weekends, too? Yes. But did I care? No—I was convinced that all of this was part of the experience of being at the bottom of the corporate ladder, and I was willing, even eager, to pay my dues.
Landing this job was a monumental accomplishment for which I was so proud of myself. But after the initial rush of being hired wore off several months into the contract, I had to admit it wasn’t going well. They almost never wanted to listen to, much less use, my ideas. The few that they did use always did well, but only my supervisor got credit for those. I was driving two and a half hours each way from my house to the company’s headquarters for what was supposed to be my dream job, but I was miserable.
Ten months in, they announced that they were restructuring, which is just fancy corporate speak for “someone is about to get laid off.” Which in this case was obviously me. I could not have been more heartbroken. As someone with borderline delusional confidence in everything I do (aka a Virgo), I had never considered the possibility that my dream job wouldn’t work out. I’d pursued this goal longer than anything else in my life. The reality of it going down the drain so quickly and aggressively crushed my spirit in ways I had never anticipated. I know now that who I am and what I do should never be conflated, but at the time, I thought that failing to succeed in a system literally designed to be hostile to young women and especially young women of color somehow meant that I had failed as a person.
On the other hand, my family and my boyfriend, Pili, all of whom were self-employed and healthily skeptical of the company during my time there, were thrilled for me. Everyone was in agreement that this was a reason to celebrate. When I initially called my dad after it happened, he said, verbatim, “Congratulations!” My mom said, “This is the best thing that has ever happened to you.” Although they empathized with me, none of them pitied me for even a second, because they were completely convinced that this failure would not define me. It wouldn’t even leave a scratch. To be honest, I thought they were all out of their minds because, hello, I’d just lost my “dream” job—but it turns out they were completely right.
But first, the world shut down.
* * *
We all know what happened in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus hit and we all had to be confined to our homes. With a newly depleted sense of self, I was extremely unsure of my future and what the hell I was supposed to do now—a feeling that had never been more foreign to me. I had never not known what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. I had no plan and no idea where to go from here. Also, living in quarantine under constant fear was an intensely unique brand of anxiety I think everyone was experiencing at once.
It was Pili who offered what no one could have predicted would be my way out. He suggested I make a TikTok account as a creative outlet to help cheer me up while we were at home. In those days, when I heard “TikTok,” my brain immediately went to teenagers lip-syncing and dancing, essentially making me feel too geriatric to even exist on the app, let alone create content. But that all began to change during lockdown. Suddenly, everyone was on the app, including many creators that I started to love for their different niches and styles, and its new on-the-fly, quippy style of video content was surging in popularity as people searched for ways to connect.
Anyone who’s used social media knows that there’s no real way to manufacture virality. At first, I was just posting here and there, hoping that my friends and maybe a few other people would see the videos I was making on their For You pages. I talked about things that were important to me and that I could riff on, like a video about catcalling, or one showcasing the sweet things Pili would do for me as proof that we should all expect more from our male romantic partners.
And then it happened. One of my TikToks, a video about very specific red flags in men, blew up. I declared that any man who calls The Wolf of Wall Street his favorite movie of all time, or who has an obsession with Tom Brady—not the Bucs or the Pats, just Tom Brady—should be jailed (a clear and obvious joke, but also … is it?). And it went viral.
This was due in part to the onslaught of outraged men who flocked to my comment section and started stitching my videos to rally against me. But far more significantly, it was the result of an explosion in the rate of engagement on the post from other women, femmes, and nonbinary people who were fervently thanking me for articulating exactly what they had experienced, too.
The rest, as they say, is history.
* * *
To be honest, something I was wary about when I started writing this book was the memoir aspect of it. After all, I’m still in my twenties. I wasn’t even certain I had lived a life interesting enough to warrant a memoir at all, let alone at this age. It’s true that my life’s changed in ways beyond what I could have ever imagined, but only in the last few years have I really started charting my own course.
Obviously, I have a lot of strong thoughts and feelings, and I am beyond honored when people who have found community within my platform reach out to me for advice, but I’m currently living my own life as well! That’s not to say I don’t always have something to say, because believe me I have no shortage of opinions (that’s the Virgo in me). I just know there’s literally no way for anyone to have all their shit figured out in their twenties—or possibly ever. No matter what happens to you, or when, you’ll always continue to grow and evolve, and that’s something to be grateful for.
But then I think about how, over the last few years, we’ve built a fierce online community together supporting one another through the process of digging out the patriarchy that has been deeply rooted in our brains. As much as my community loves to hear me roast terrible men on their behalf (and as much as I enjoy doing it), the primary goal in what I do is actually to decenter men. It is meant to empower you by taking away the power of misogynistic men when it comes to how you value and see yourself. In a way, all of the videos I post, the content I make, the men I drag, the people I uplift, have been leading up to this moment. So in that regard, it’s fair to say this book is an extension of my videos, one that has allowed me to dig deeper than ever before.
In case it somehow isn’t already obvious, let me clarify up front that this is definitely NOT a dating book. This is not even a book about men, though it may seem like they feature prominently. It’s a book that focuses on internalized biases, and how to uproot them from our lives—but most importantly it is a book about you, all the women, nonbinary, femme, and queer people who I love, support, and will ride for, forever. And how truly life-changing showing up for one another can be.
I can’t share my boyfriend with you, but I am here to affirm that not only are you not asking for too much in a potential partner, but you should be asking for more. I can’t share my sister with you, but I can help you unpack any lingering female rivalry so that you can experience true femme solidarity and friendship. I can’t give you my self-confidence, but I can help you realize how important it is to stand up for yourself. And I can’t give you my cackle, but I can make you laugh, and I plan to do so often along the way. So while I continue to stay firmly planted on the necks of terrible men on the internet, this very text, through a combination of love, life lessons, and affirmative content, will be my guide and companion for you to work on the most important relationship of all: the one with yourself.
1 MEET THE AFUALOS
In September 1995, right at the tail end of Virgo season, my parents’ dreams came true—and the prophecy of all the world’s worst men came to pass: I was born.
I rolled into the world a nine-pound, twelve-ounce baby, and I like to think that I came out cackling. Not just because I’m Samoan and our people are known for their sense of humor, but because I was born knowing the best and funniest people in my life, still: my parents and my older sister. My parents named me Drew because my mom thought that a gender-neutral name would help me get job interviews later on in my life. She had seen a program on TV that explained how corporate businesses were more likely to choose the résumé of a man over a woman, after looking at the name, even if the qualifications were exactly the same. It’s almost as if she knew that I would grow up to antagonize misogynists for a living, and my name would become one that would haunt terrible men, everywhere.
My immediate family consists of my parents, Deison, and my younger brother, Donovan, who was born when I was nine. We do have a really big extended family, first because Samoan families are huge, and also because my family has been in Southern California stretching back three to four generations. But when I was growing up, it was just the four of us (five, once Donovan was born) as a very tight-knit unit. It’s why I consider my family members my best friends, support system, and confidants, because we’ve been close from the beginning.
As an aside, that’s why I find it so funny when the anonymous misogynistic men in my comment section accuse me of “fatherless” behavior, because the reality is that I am entirely the way I am because my dad is so present and supportive. In addition to being a family-centric former athlete, he is a wonderful, caring, and emotionally intelligent person who has been a faithful and loving partner to my badass mom. Which, by the way, if you think I’m loud and outspoken, I know for a fact you haven’t met my mom, who is both the breadwinner and the beating heart of our family.
My sister and I are two years apart in age but grew up going to school only one grade apart, and because my parents were pretty young when they had us, sometimes it felt like we all grew up together. Deison and I were surrounded by community, always. Our dad was often away because he was trying to parlay his college football success into a more steady and financially viable career. He started out as a walk-on in junior college (actually, a walk-by—he was just walking around campus and the coach asked him to join the team) and went all the way to the NFL. Still, I know everyone thinks professional athletes are rich, but the reality is that only a very small percentage earn the kind of money that makes headlines. And as this was going on our mom was launching her own career in corporate America and finishing school at the same time. We weren’t financially well off, but we were rich in support. We had a cohort of extended and chosen family to help with our upbringing. I often say it was like I was being raised by the cast of Friends because the adults in my life were young and accessible. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and fortunately my siblings and I were no exception to that. This included my uncle and my godfather, who would take turns picking us up from school or taking us to sports practice or just generally stepping in and stepping up to make sure our childhood was as unaffected by any instability as possible. They were each instrumental in my upbringing, and are the reason I know that men today can do better, if they choose to do better: because I grew up witnessing it with my own two eyes.
On top of that, Deison and I had friends throughout middle and high school who’d get pseudo-adopted by our mom, living at our house for months on end. Seeing what a difference that kind of love from another family could make in people’s lives, knowing they had a person who was completely there for them, no questions asked, made me so proud of my mom and so determined to be like her.
Because of this, or maybe because I trust them implicitly, I literally tell my parents everything. Not just the things that I think they would approve of, but also the hard, embarrassing shit. Because I know my mom will keep it real with me, and if I’m doing something she doesn’t think I should do, she will tell me, point blank. And usually I will listen … but if I don’t, she’s only got herself to blame for my know-it-all mindset.
By Samoan standards, our immediate family is pretty small—just to give you a sense of what I mean, my dad comes from a family of five siblings, his dad from a family of nine, and his mom from a family of fourteen. My mom comes from a family of three, but her dad comes from a family of seven. And his dad remarried after my maternal great-grandma died, so at some point I gained a whole batch of step-cousins. Which makes it feels like I’m somehow always discovering a new cousin I never knew about.
Even though we’re from a small island culture, we’re loud and we’re proud, and we’ll always make sure you know you’re in the presence of a Samoan—it’s pretty easy; just follow the raucous laughter, because if there’s anything my people know how to do, it’s crack a joke. Nothing makes me prouder than when fellow Samoans reach out to me and tell me how much they see our culture—from my familiar cackle laugh to the jokes I make to drag sexist men by their half-court hairlines—embodied in everything I do.
To my fellow Samoans and Polynesians: It warms my heart that I can be some sort of representation for y’all. It truly is one of the best parts of what I do and not something I ever take lightly. My Samoan heritage is a torch I carry with so much love and thankfulness in my heart.
If there are three things the world knows about Samoans, they are: one, athleticism is in our bloodline; two, we love to celebrate; and three, we love to sing.
And when I say “celebrate,” I mean that Samoans will celebrate life, death, and everything in between. Basically, we will find a reason to get together and we will sing, dance, eat, and drink. Funerals, birthdays, graduations, weddings, you name it: not only will we show up in droves, but we will bring enough food to feed a village (shout-out to my mom’s potato crab salad, which is in such high demand that there was one year when we made it no fewer than six times in a weeklong span, for over two hundred people each time), and we will put on a production or floor show of some sort.
For example, graduations are a huge thing in Samoan culture, from both high school and college. Many members of your extended family will show up and cheer loudly and proudly. Afterward, we decorate you with hundreds of handmade candy and flower leis, and a handmade kupuiga or haku (which essentially is a celebratory headdress). It can be made of fresh flowers or money—either way, it’s a statement.
Then, after the graduation, the graduate’s family will host an aiga, or a party / family get-together—and when I say “party,” I mean Party with a capital P. I’m talking literally hundreds of relatives, and friends. I loved going to these parties when I was a kid, because I’d get to see all my favorite cousins, and each time, it felt like a little reunion. Especially when I was younger and we’d be celebrating an older cousin’s graduation, all the kids would get together after school three or four times a week to practice a coordinated dance in matching outfits that we’d then perform in front of our entire family at the aiga. After, we’d laugh, dance, sing, and eat all night.
Imagine doing that for every cousin. That was my childhood.
I didn’t always feel super connected with my Samoan heritage when I was young, because I am not 100 percent Samoan (I have one white grandparent, out of four). But during events like these aigas, I’d feel so, so close to my culture. Seeing my extended family and community come together to put on an incredible celebration that would go on well into the night, complete with cultural dances like a traditional siva Samoa, a Hawaiian hula, a Maori haka, or a war chant dance that originated in New Zealand, and Tahitian dance, as well as enough food to feed everyone multiple times over and still have enough for leftovers … It would fill me with pride and joy. I would realize how lucky I was to be here, to be Samoan, to experience the overwhelming joy and energy of these celebrations that were unique to my culture.
As I mentioned before, Samoans celebrate every aspect of our existence: birth, life, and death. We honor those who come into this world, the milestones they achieve, and their passage into the next life. No joke, I’ve been to over thirty funerals, just because my extended family is so big and dedicated to celebration. We honor the living just as much as those who have passed on, because family is the most important thing in my culture.
Copyright © 2024 by Drew Afualo Enterprises, LLC.