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With Hanukkah already here and Christmas just around the corner, it’s time to truly buckle down and start making our lists, checking them twice, et cetera. As a holiday person, nothing brings me more joy than trying to find the perfect gifts for my loved ones. But there is one group (or rather, gender) that’s always stumped me in my present-picking: men.
I abhor gender essentialism as much as the next normal person, but unfortunately, it really has been my experience that men are hard to shop for (and of course, women be shopping). Somehow 99% of the women and nonbinary people in my life are a delight to purchase gifts for, while the men—cis and trans alike—remain a cipher. As a queer woman, I’m not used to spending much of my time trying to figure out what men want—and yet, every Chrismukkah I find myself pondering the same question: How do I captivate the whimsy of the men in my life without going bankrupt?
I was thrilled when I discovered whiskey stones, which seemed like the obvious solution. For years, every men’s magazine and website seemed to tout them as the ne plus ultra of gifts for men—modern and innovative yet macho-retro enough to make them feel like Hemingway. Imagine my disappointment then, when I learned that men don’t actually want whiskey stones. Actually, it’s possible that nobody does, regardless of their gender, as New Yorker writer Helen Rosner demonstrated in her 2019 gift guide: “I took a sip, frowned, waited five minutes, and sipped again. The tequila remained room temperature. I recalled the laws of thermodynamics, and realized the truth about whiskey stones: Despite their striking geometry, they are entirely pointless. I frowned again, and drank my glass of room-temperature tequila, which had rocks in it.”
Confused, I turned to the brain trust of men in my life—including my dad, my partner (who asked me to identify them as a “transmasculine king”), and several friends who were willing to indulge my panicked “What do you want for Christmas?” texts—to tell me whether they remotely wanted whiskey stones, and if not, what they actually longed to receive for the holidays. Their answers are as follows:
“What the fuck is a whiskey stone?”
Actually desired gift: “I don’t want anything.”
“My drink of choice is a martini, though I do enjoy a whiskey with a well-crafted ice cube from time to time. That said, I feel like I would lose the whiskey stones somewhere in my house.”
Actually desired gift: Prada loafers
“I get the idea of whiskey stones, so as not to dilute the taste of what I’m drinking, but the name alone makes me think more of passing stones than using them to marginally improve my enjoyment of brown liquor. So no, I don’t need them.”
Actually desired gift: Those Instagram-friendly tennis candles
“Admittedly not a big whiskey guy, but I have to say this would disappoint me as a gift. Whiskey stones have always felt like a comically gendered ‘safe’ thing.”
Actually desired gift: “I would prefer a spa day or massage to something that helps me drink more snobbishly.”
“If you buy these for me, I will probably end up breaking something with them, and then drinking whiskey without the stones to alleviate my guilt.”
Actually desired gift: Tickets to see Kylie Minogue in Vegas
So it seems the jury is in: Men really, really don’t want whiskey stones, for a variety of reasons that all make perfect sense to me. What am I going to discover next, that women don’t actually want fancy hand creams in their Christmas stockings? (Well, too bad, because I bought a ton of fancy hand cream and I’m going to keep pushing it on everyone, irrespective of their gender. Happy holidays!)
