I Tried to Avoid Women Like Mike Pence Does for a Week. I Made Some Ghastly Discoveries.

In Human Guinea Pig, Slate writers subject themselves to various experiments and indignities so you don’t have to.

Men are never to spend any time with a woman without a chaperoning presence. That’s a core tenet of the Modesto Manifesto, as defined by the late mega-preacher and notorious fundamentalist crusader Billy Graham. The idea is that by putting yourself under constant, panoptic surveillance, you shall never succumb to temptations of the flesh.

You probably already understand the retrograde logic of this philosophy. It’s built on the twin premises that women are conniving succubi put on Earth exclusively to test the sexual discipline of other people’s spouses—and that men possess no agency over who they try to sleep with, rendering the penis an autonomous, malignant presence on the body. It also assumes that men exclusively marry women, and that a consensual, mutually beneficial agreement for there to be some extramarital touching is totally out of the question—all classics of prehistoric Christianity.

Billy Graham established this statute in 1948, with input from a variety of his other neo-evangelist comrades, and lived by it until his death in 2018. More recently, a version of the creed was popularized by former Vice President and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence—who is destined to accrue, like, 0.7 percent of the vote come primary season.

Pence has been married to his wife Karen since 1985, and during that time, he has never dined with a woman without the leering proximity of the Mrs., ostensibly to keep his raging erection in check. (In fact, Pence has mandated that any governmental aides assisting him during late-night shifts need to be male. How horny is this guy?) To top it all off, he allegedly calls her “Mother.”

It seems like a miserable, needlessly convoluted existence. A political life is a public life, which seems to mean that Pence must navigate his self-enforced castigation while frequently interfacing with women in leadership roles. (I’m imagining Karen looking on from the bar while Pence and Angela Merkel debate global energy policy.) Furthermore, it demonstrates an intrinsic self-loathing and fearfulness about the most casual, low-stakes, and lighthearted flirting—one of the few things that makes life worth living—which, as someone who grew up going to a Baptist megachurch, is one of the integral features of the masculine Protestant archetype.

I say all of this because Slate asked me—a 32-year-old media professional with a liberal arts degree, a long-term cohabiting girlfriend, an apartment in Brooklyn, and, let’s say, a 65-to-35 split between female friends and male friends—to live like Mike Pence for a week. I was to embrace his petrifying fear of impure thoughts, to believe that every woman on the face of the Earth was plotting to ruin my life, and to steal away from their influence. If everything went to plan, perhaps I’d come out the other side with a greater appreciation for what makes one of the most unseemly politicians in America tick. Who knows? Maybe it could be the start of my own cascading puritanical spiral, as I learn just how euphoric inner castration can be.

I earmarked two Wednesdays in early August to be the start and end points of this experiment, and before I embarked on my hermetic era, it had already become obvious that there are certain logistical hang-ups that made the principles of this lifestyle untenable. First and foremost, both my boss and the other full-time writer on the Human Interest team at Slate are women—which I’m sure a guy like Mike Pence would disapprove of for reasons that are far more sexist than sexual. Our team has one-on-ones and pitch meetings every week, which means if Pence becomes president and institutes total theocracy—the Gestapo going restaurant to restaurant in order to make sure that men are not alone with a woman other than their betrothed—then I literally wouldn’t be able to do my job. Compromises needed to be made already, so I resigned to make any and all work calls in the living room, within the direct eyeline of my girlfriend, keeping the ridiculous charade aboveboard.

The other apprehension I was staring down was far more humiliating. I am not a politician—I do not gallivant around the campaign trail cutting ribbons, kissing babies, shaking a zillion different hands on a long afternoon in Paducah, Kentucky—and I’ve also been living with the same partner for three years now. All this is to say that I’m rarely in a position to be dining alone with a woman who is not my girlfriend. So it occurred to me that one of the horrifying truths I might discover during my Pence dalliance is that I’ve become an inveterate and domesticated Wife Guy—someone who literally never leaves the house without his significant other—both of us mutated into a single amorphous, childless unit.

“I really don’t think your life is going to be any different,” she quipped when I told her about what we were cooking up for this month’s Human Guinea Pig. It was the coldest thing she’s ever said, because the truer a retort is, the more damaging it is. Maybe all of my proclaimed alternative fashionability was totally counterfeit; maybe I’m just as lame as Mike Pence. There was only one way to find out.

Wednesdays are typically pretty light in my itinerary. It’s often designated for our weekly book club, but this particular session had been postponed because a few of our regulars were out of town, leaving a voluminous blank space on the calendar. My girlfriend had dinner plans with some college pals in the city, which is the sort of thing I wouldn’t have been invited to even if I wasn’t trying to Be Like Pence. So I spent my first afternoon in my stringent Judeo-Christian world watching an interview with Charles Barkley—which is the sort of entertainment that tends to be absent of any female interest, perspective, or intrigue whatsoever. We were off to a good start.

I tried to keep the trad-hetero vibes churning deep into the evening. Seriously, what did I use to do when I was single and dateless on a random weekday? Naturally, I texted an old college buddy, who is a man. He arrived at my door brandishing a six-pack of Pacifico, and we both sank into a debauched night of two-player tabletop gaming. (Summoner Wars, if you’re curious.) My friend has been married for years, so our rendezvous was something like a platonic affair. If this is what it is to live like Mike Pence—to fearlessly indulge in my nerdiest and most femme-repellent inclinations—then maybe this week wouldn’t be so bad after all.

News of my Mike Pence pivot had trickled into our greater social sphere, which means that my male friends and I were hard at work dreaming up new ways to keep ourselves occupied—while respecting the limitations of the doctrine—on what was shaping up into a turgid, sweltering Thursday. A lightbulb went off in the group text. Tonight was the Hall of Fame Game, the dawn of the NFL’s yearly preseason, and one of the grimmest dude-centric spectacles on the calendar. At last, we had our plans.

My girlfriend was enjoying another blissful girls-only retreat—this time a café co-working session which neatly morphed into an extended happy hour—while two of my guy friends and I crowded around a skunky high-top in the neighborhood’s dankest dive. It seems important to note here that Mike Pence seems to be a teetotaler; his only bad habit, he says, is nonalcoholic beer (which is a total humblebrag and he knows it).

But the Modesto Manifesto says nothing about vices outside of the elemental mistrust of women, which means that I felt like I could imbibe with aggro ferocity while keeping the structure of the practice intact. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if the sudden withdrawal of feminine energy might’ve been emphasizing my more churlish aptitudes. By the middle of the first quarter I found myself gambling on this terrible 21–16 Cleveland Browns–New York Jets slobberknocker, which is something nobody should ever do under any circumstances. My caveman DNA was percolating, the backslide had begun. If I wasn’t careful, I’d be taking up golfing next.

My girlfriend, as always, was there to save me before things got too dark. Our Friday was wide open, and as a late-summer sunset smoldered outside our windows, we sat on the couch with nothing to do. Perhaps sensing that the physical lack of women in my social structure was leeching out some of my latent bro frailties, she cued up It’s Complicated—a proud, tertiary Nancy Meyers joint—as a way to soften my interior after losing $25 on the Cleveland Browns. It was just what the doctor ordered.

If you haven’t seen the film before, you’re basically looking at a standard suite of empty-nest travails; divorced dads dating much younger women, moms smoking weed and sharing pain au chocolat with their hunky architect (who also happens to be played by Steve Martin), and a brush with death that sparks a deeply selfish midlife crisis. You get the sense that the content of the movie is exactly what Mike Pence is trying to avoid with the Modesto Manifesto: a family untethered by a combination of male ego, neediness, and good old-fashioned avarice—all of which, in his mind, could be sparked by one chance meeting with an unmarried woman. So perhaps this is how the Pence flock gets a dose of suburban intrigue when life gets dull. You may never be able to enjoy a sordid, emotionally fraught affair with Meryl Streep, but you’ll always have Nancy Meyers.

I should probably note that I wasn’t focused on avoiding random female encounters in the wild during my Pence exercise. If you live in New York City, you are going to be surrounded by people of all stripes in elevators, subways, and coffee shops as you go about your day—and even the most devout Christian fascists must accept that as fact. (Come to think of it, it’s likely a lot easier to ensconce oneself in an impermeable bubble back in Columbus, Indiana. I think I’m finally starting to understand the roots of Pence’s derangement.)

Anyway, on Day 4 my girlfriend and I went out with a bunch of friends to a bar. The group skewed female, and nobody spiraled into incorrigible libidinal psychosis. (She didn’t even need to hawk over us like “Mother” to keep the peace.) If men could understand how easy it is to be friends with whoever you want, nature would finally heal.

Is Mike Pence allowed to text women? The Modesto Manifesto specifically restricts its membership in the context of social environments—bars, restaurants, churches, whatever. But other, more intangible means of interaction—like, say, a phone call—were left unaccounted for. Yes, these rules were originally penned in the 1940s, long before communication was digitized. But you have to imagine that if Billy Graham did live and die by this code, surely there were a few incidents where he, I don’t know, wrote a letter to a woman. Did he have Mrs. Graham read it over before licking the seal? Did she monitor every pen stroke? Was he dictating the type to her? These are the gray areas of the femme-free lifestyle.

I found myself thinking about this because, toward the end of this experiment, I received a totally inert Instagram DM from a female friend of both me and my partner. (If you must know, we were bonding over the ’90s post-hardcore band Slint.) A chill went up my spine. Wait, am I about to betray the Modesto lifestyle? So I quickly wrote back explaining to my friend that in order to internalize the Penceian spirit, I would need to communicate with her exclusively in a group text with my girlfriend for the next couple of days. She responded by sending an exclamation-mark emoji before dropping the thread entirely.

Slate has a lot of brilliant women on staff, which further accentuates the whole texting confusion. Is it verboten to connect with my femme co-workers in the Culture channel? An enigma wrapped in a riddle! I decided to do something like a “masculine carbon offset” for my interstitial interactions with the women at Slate by attempting to get in plenty of unambiguous Guy Talk around the office when I could. For instance, on Day 6, me and three men spent an hour chopping it up about the history of the music-crit institution Pitchfork Media—which naturally gave way to a discussion about a recent tweet by Jenny Lewis about indie rock ethics. I doubt Mike Pence knows who Rilo Kiley is, but if he did, he’d be proud.

We wrapped up the experiment exactly where I started. In the living room, surrounded by a few boys, playing a board game on a hot weekday night. Once again, I did my best to make the evening as oppressively mannish as possible. We unpacked Cuba Libre, a war game set during the Cuban Revolution, where four players wrest control of asymmetrical sides during the insurgency (government forces, Fidelistas, the students’ movement, and the mafia), brokering uneasy alliances and leveraging dwindling resources on a path toward victory. (This might shock you, but once again, my girlfriend had her own plans.) It is the sort of board game that takes about an hour and a half to teach, which is a ritual that makes all of the women in my life feel like they’re about to die. My girlfriend has said that when she listens to me explain how little wooden cubes move around a board, her soul leaves her body. I can’t really blame her, and that’s the ironic thing with the Modesto Manifesto as a whole. Paradoxically, Mike Pence’s parochial, flagellating extremism allowed me to indulge myself rather than discipline myself. A week following his footsteps unlocked a certain intoxicating shamelessness in the way I organize my interests. I honored the primacy of my hetero-male self; I played a Cuba game with three other hetero males until 1:00 in the morning.

Mike Pence and I don’t have a lot in common. I believe in the validity of LGBTQ+ identity. I think a major reconstruction of global capital is the only way we’ll be able to preserve the human race on planet Earth. I would welcome the decline of American paramountcy in international relations, and I am certain that people should generally start having sex before they turn 25.

However, despite the flagrant patriarchal toxicity at the heart of the Billy Graham project, I have learned that Pence and I are similar in one crucial way, which is that we are both boring men who enjoy the company of our significant others. If you construct a nice life for yourself—from left-incubating coastal enclaves to the rolling plains of MAGA Indiana—the Modesto undertaking isn’t much of a challenge. Maybe there’s hope for unity after all.