Wearing a COVID mask is truly awful and you don't have to pretend it isn't

Earlier this year Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider gave the Ukrainians his full endorsement for their use of the power anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It” in protests against their Russian aggressors. In 2020 he withheld that blessing from a group of Florida “anti-maskers” who used the song while protesting corporate COVID mask mandates. Apparently people criticized him for the outward hypocrisy of that decision, to which he replied a while ago:

Dee Snider🇺🇸🎤 @deesnider

People are asking me why I endorsed the use of "We're Not Gonna Take It" for the Ukrainian people and did not for the anti-maskers. Well, one use is for a righteous battle against oppression; the other is a infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience.

Ha ha, this is of course obviously false. Protesting against mask mandates is not “infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience.” It’s the most normal thing in the world. A mask mandate is a stupid, ineffective measure that doesn’t work, for starters; it’s just a ridiculous, childish policy, a cowardly response to widespread public hysteria more than anything else. It’s a proposal to stop an airborne aerosolized respiratory virus by making people wear damp, filthy strips of cotton on their faces for hours every day. I would be truly embarrassed to have ever supported such a thing and I wonder if that’s what’s going on with Dee Snider here.

But beyond that, can we please stop pretending that wearing a face mask is just an “inconvenience” or something along those lines? It’s not. Wearing a mask is really, really awful. Everybody knows it but for some reason nearly everybody over the past two-and-a-half years felt compelled to pretend otherwise, to act as if it’s just a modestly bothersome thing at worst and that anyone who objects to it is being, as Dee Snider put it, “infantile” and ridiculous.

My family was fortunate enough to have essentially never worn masks over the course of the pandemic. Our children are homeschooled and never put them on even once. My wife and I wore them a scant number of times. I work from home. We refused to go into venues or stores that required them. We shopped only at places that didn’t require them. We found a Catholic parish that didn’t require them and went there for the duration of the diocesan mask mandate. Both of us put on masks probably less than a dozen times over the course of the whole pandemic, only when it was absolutely necessary. All of which is to say that, in contrast to people who acquiesced to wearing them every day, we know how truly miserable it is to strap a mask to your face, in ways that many others may have forgotten. Here the the basics:

It’s incredibly uncomfortable. A mask is hot, sweaty, itchy, constrictive, awful. It makes breathing a hot, humid process. In cooler weather it’s awful; in humid weather it is abominable. The mask quickly becomes damp and/or sweaty. It bothers your skin. If you have facial hair it crinkles, crackles and itches against it. If you have glasses it fogs them up. Your lower face quickly becomes a moist greenhouse. It’s awful. It goes very far beyond an “inconvenience.” It’s a miserable way to exist—of course it is! Before 2020 if someone had said, “Hey, do you want to strap a thick cotton mask to your face, breath your own hot moist air, walk around with a damp strip of cotton over your mouth, give yourself a facial irritation, and generally just be physically uncomfortable all the time?” you would have said, “Uh, no, that sounds awful.” It still is, even if you pretend otherwise.

It’s humiliating. Wearing a mask is embarrassing. I have not yet seen anyone wear a COVID mask that doesn’t look degraded and demeaned, myself included in the rare instances when I have done it. It covers up half of your face, turns 50% of one of the most important parts of your body into a featureless, inhuman lump. It’s humiliating, of course, because it’s a useless intervention borne of fear and hysteria. If it worked that would be one thing. But it doesn’t; of course it doesn’t. Strapping a piece of cotton or an ill-fitting surgical mask to your face isn’t going to stop a contagious respiratory virus from spreading! And the fact that it’s miserable and uncomfortable to wear is doubly humiliating: You’re strapping a damp, sweaty, moist, uncomfortable, dehumanizing, embarrassing diaper to your face, for hours a day, and it still doesn’t do anything—it’s a double whammy of embarrassment, like wearing a bike helmet everywhere because you think you might fall down and hit your head. Just humiliating.

It spreads fear and hysteria and paranoia. More than anything, masks have become the great symbol of COVID hysteria over the past 30 months. People are obsessed with masks. They wear them in obscenely inappropriate situations—outside, in the fresh air, at parks, in open-air malls, on nature trails, places where you are in almost literally 0% danger of catching COVID and where you should be breathing in fresh cool clean oxygen instead of damp, sweaty, cotton-filtered air. People wear masks schizophrenically—they will wear a mask at a gathering for 20 minutes, then take it off for 15 minutes, then quickly strap it back on when someone new shows up, then fiddle with it for another 12 minutes before looping it around their chins. None of it makes any sense except in the context of incoherent mania. People use mask-wearing to judge the moral solvency of the people around them; if you wear a sweaty, itchy, useless piece of fabric on your face you are considered a Good Person, a Science-Believer and someone who Cares About Others. If you do not wear a sweaty, itchy, useless piece of fabric on your face you are a Bad Person, Selfish, Anti-Science and Very Very Bad. Wearing a mask always contributes to this bizarre puritanical zeitgeist.

It doesn’t work. This cannot be stressed enough. A mask doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything. Of course it doesn’t. If it did, you would have heard of it before 2020. Anthony Fauci knew it at the start of 2020; so did Jerome Adams and the CDC and the World Health Organization and, well, pretty much everybody. That’s why they all told you not to do it in the first few months of the pandemic:

“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.

Of course! Everybody knew it. Then some sort of directive came down and everybody changed their minds quite literally overnight. Suddenly wearing a mask was not only good, it was absolutely unimpeachably inarguably a bulletproof way to stop COVID-19. The message honestly changed 100% over the course of like 36 hours. It was incredible to watch. But the science didn’t change; masking was always a useless response to a respiratory viral epidemic and it still is. It was just something that local and national leaders all over the world decided we all had to do, and everybody got on board with it, and then it became a global quasi-religion, with nearly everyone a Shiite Masker, demanding total fealty to this evidence-free, absurdist new regime. But even that level of zealotry can’t make something work if it doesn’t work. And masking doesn’t work.

So, no, masking isn’t merely an “inconvenience.” It’s a physically awful and uncomfortable, embarrassing, hysterical and useless measure imposed upon the world for no reason other than so that political leaders could feel like they were doing something in the face of a crisis. That’s it. And contra whatever Dee Snider thinks, no, you shouldn’t take it anymore.