My articles on Ask Men are much shorter.  They typically want 800-1000 words, whereas my stuff for Cracked pushes 3000 words pretty regularly.  So I have more room for detail in the Cracked articles.  Ask Men is also a lot tighter with their language.  They let certain words slide (ass, bitch, etc.), but they censor words like fuck and shit.  As far as what I’ve seen, they seem to follow the TV rule of cursing.

It’s also more tailored to a male audience (hence, the URL).  I just typically don’t fall into the usual category of male writing (the Adam Carolla type of humor) because I don’t believe that most men are like that in real life.  My perspective on male life isn’t really represented in mainstream media because it’s not controversial.  But the fact that they let me write from that point of view is one of the main reasons I do articles for them.  I’m sick of seeing shows that feature mentally stunted dipshits and hold them up as a representation of the male mindset.  Somebody has to step up and say, “No, that’s not how we are at all,” so since I have the opportunity, I might as well take it.

I used to write under the tone of a character who was that sort of male douchebag, and it went over well… but for all the wrong reasons.  Instead of most people reading an article I wrote on boobs and recognizing that I was making fun of that type of guy, they’d read that article and be like, “Hell yeah!  Preach on, brother!”

That’s not what I was going for, and it’s hard to convey that sort of satire in text form.  So I figured I might as well take this current approach of just telling it exactly like I see it.  No sugar coating.  No subtlety.  No hinting.  Just flat-out, “We’re not like the fucking dumbasses you see on TV.  We don’t have little black books with all of our sexual conquests in it.  We don’t spend every waking hour devising plans to satisfy our boners.  And the guys we do see doing this, we want to beat them until the molecules that make up their bodies lose their bonds and just vaporize back into the atmosphere.”

But overall, yes, I’m more subdued over there because I’m writing in a different voice for a different audience.  One thing I want to always make sure of is that I’m not just writing Cracked articles for Ask Men.  Not only would that not be fair to Cracked, but it wouldn’t be fair to me as an author, or to Ask Men who already have their own voice as an established publication.