“Spilling the tea” is parlance for dishing the dirt or, more simply, gossiping about others. This pastime of women everywhere carries with it both benefits and detriments. The Good Book warns us against gossiping for fear of spreading fake news (unless one does it professionally, of course) or unfairly ruining another’s reputation. However, some amount of sharing secrets is to be applauded, like when Wernher Von Braun shared the Nazi’s rocket technology, allowing the United States to fake the first moon landing, or when Donna Brazille leaked the questions to Hillary Clinton to steal the Democrat nomination from Bernie Sanders so we could have Trump as our 45th president. Fate, like many on The Tea app, is a cruel mistress.
Sean Cook’s mom was having a hard time re-entering the dating pool since there are no lifeguards during open swim. So Sean set out to protect his mom from bad actors using his tech savvy from his years working as a software developer for Shutterfly and Salesforce. Armed with a solid six-month training credential Sean hired the best programmers in Pakistan who were still waiting on their H1B visas to cross Elon Musk’s desk. A razor-thin schematic and a few dozen hours later, the site was launched. No longer would men disguised as catfish or disenchanted boyfriends and husbands be allowed to prowl the dating world incognito. Girl power had amassed, and they were spilling tea and strumpets.
In a few short months, the memberships and their Earl Grey’s started to pour in. “Are we dating the same guy?” (as a security measure) turned into “He’s cheap and his hammer is tiny,” as the realists of the real women populated the site. Women weren’t looking to protect other women so much as practice empowerment by shaming every man within two zip codes. It didn’t matter if they knew him or not, they were going to get their two cents and drop it on the egalitarian slot machine, pull the arm, and yell “Jackpot!” or “Jacknot!” Feminism was now a blood sport.
As the downloads reached record numbers, the frenzied and mobbish harpies were so high on The Tea they, like most addicts, had no idea a crash was coming. Believing their women-only app was insulating their goings-on from the outside world, because gossipy women are nothing if not great at keeping things secret, it wasn’t long before a few men learned the game that was afoot. As word reached the weak-T thunderdome that is 4-chan, the brotherhood of men recognized the assault on manhood and public decency for what it was and decided to engage these women, despite none of them being the marrying type. In less than a few days, the internet sleuths discovered the security on The Tea was so weak it was non-existent. No firewall, malware, or spyware was in place to protect the foxes who were doxing virtually every man with the nerve to discover the question of our time – “What is a woman?” They were hiding their data right out in the open thanks to Sean and his crack team of software developers. It was the equivalent of stealing items left in a yard with a “free” sign next to them.
Upon further review, the men realized that the Tea app had evolved from a well-intentioned female security profiling tool to a platform where 4.6 million women were auditioning to be extras in Mean Girls II. Mixed in among the rightfully red-flagged predators were thousands of guys who were the targets of jilted and bitter exes whose pleasure it was to publicly humiliate their former beaus from the privacy of their own home. Women, again tempted by the delicious fruit of playing god with the lives of men, were destroying the very dating pool they had tasked themselves with cleaning up.
As turnabout is fair play, the men released the damsel’s information through a countering men’s only site with the raffish name The Box Score. Here, women were rated on their looks and body counts like a field full of Chelsea Clintons. Rather than hide their retort anonymously, the victory lap led to the stands full of women jeering their counterparts for doing precisely the same as they had done. The only winners to date are irony, accountability, and hypocrisy.
The Good Book also reminds us that irony sharpens irony, so we have to salute Sean Cook for offering women the thing they crave most – security – and like the stereotypical male, completely forgetting to close the doors and pull the shades. For his good deed, he is now facing ten separate class action lawsuits that will likely land him back in his mother’s basement, where, had he started there, he could have simply interviewed mom’s dates over a cup of tea and saved millions, and even more millions from drowning in the shallow end.
