Category: Essays & Bad Ideas

I like when I scare you a little, and the way your fear makes you instinctively retreat into your femininity.

I like the way your womanhood so often manages to cloak you and entangle you and gracefully, delicately strangle you.

[CONTENT ADVISORY: Don’t read this unless you like feeling sexually paranoid and ashamed.]

No matter the man –be he your father figure, your priest, your doctor, your judge, your boss, your teacher, your student, your lover, or simply your dearest of friends– he will always have his moment. His moment when everythng is just so; you’ll say something he doesn’t like, the light will be falling across your face in that perfect way, his hormones will be raging as they so often do, he’ll notice that you smell of flowers and sin, and you’ll realize you have never felt so small and alone.

His gaze will have become absolutely, intensely male.

That’s when he’ll look at you and silently confirm everything you’ve ever suspected about the men in your life; he’ll admit the surest of truths without uttering a word, and you’ll only be able to blink in reply. You’ll be seized by a certainty that the unthinkable is suddenly one irrational, inhuman impulse away from becoming the unforgettable.

It’ll pass in a second; he’ll shrug or shout or change the subject, and you’ll be able to breathe again. From the point of view of anyone watching, it will be as if nothing happened. Everything will be the same, except you’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt that somewhere deep inside him, within this man who shares your world, there was a little voice speaking out, clearly and urgently.

“No. Not her. Not this time.”

You’ll both actively try to forget, of course, and he might even succeed; after all, he has only the memory of what he did not do, while you must carry the knowledge of all he might have done. But that’s not the part that will truly haunt you.

No, the thing that will make your nights long and sleepless will be a gnawing, pressing inner voice of your own, one that cares less for you than it should. Over and over, it will ask you a thousand questions using a thousand words, all of them variations on a single theme.

“But… why not?”

I hate asks that start that way; it just doesn’t make sense to me.

“What would you do with me if you owned me for 24 hours?” How the fuck should I know, nitwit? Who are you? What are you?

I mean, okay, if you happened to be conventionally pretty, maybe “I’d bury a load in you” would be the most direct response. Even if you’re a complete tabula rasa to me, you’re still a woman and I’m still a man; reducing you to a series of satisfying curves and openings for the purposes of my erection more or less comes naturally to us both. But it comes naturally to just about any brain-dead frat-boy and his drunken, slutty prey, too; you surely want something other than that from me.

Yep, if you’re coming to me, you’re wanting more than just a bruised cervix. You want your mixed-up little head unlocked and pawed through like a bargain bin full of old, scratched-up DVDs with titles like Daddy’s Little Burdensome Obligation, Mom’s Life And How I Ruined It, and that deathless classic, When Uncles With Boundary Issues Attack. But that shit doesn’t happen without some prep work.

Mindfucking a cunt is all about knowing her background; the things that have happened that shouldn’t, the dreams that seemed within reach but weren’t. It’s about trawling through the swamp of her memory for the unburied bodies she hides there. It’s about finding that one spot on her flesh that she hates the most, that square inch of microscopically discolored or wrinkled skin into which she has squeezed a lifetime of self-loathing, and poking that shit with a pointy stick until she cries from the relief of being understood.

See, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t answer your lame hypothetical question without first understanding what makes you tick; after all, what I ultimately want to do to you is whatever it is that scares you the most.

…often have penises.

Ain’t that right, bitches?

I torture you and you pray to me in apology. I break you and you hobble to me for protection. I abandon you and you lose yourself in my wake. I debase the coin of your virtue, and you respect me for the clever theft. I forget sometimes you are human, and those are the times you like me best.

You need never ask what I feel for you, dear girls. Whatever else could I feel, save love and contempt?

I don’t call myself “a misogynist” because such a label is woefully incapable of conveying the vast and murky depths of my misanthropy. Hell, I’m as much a misandrist as anything; on the whole, I find men kind of simple-minded, tribal, and boring. Given the option, I’ll take a cunt over a prick every time.

In fact, what I view as My Misogyny generally manifests as an amiable, amused sort of pity. I’m not angry with women, don’t feel threatened by them, and don’t resent their successes; that sort of thing strikes me as ridiculous. When I get in an elevator with a random woman, I’m not the one who has to become momentarily aware that she is small and I am large and we are all alone. When people are looking for authoritative opinions, I’m not the one who has to worry that the pitch of her voice will render her thoughts instinctively irrelevant and irritating to at least half the room. When we’re at a party and someone inquires about not having kids by 35, I’m not the one who’ll be getting the sad, vaguely smug looks that say “You are defective and will never be whole.”

That’s why angry misogyny perplexes me: it’s so goddamned petty. From where I’m sitting, being a girl is a process wherein you’re yanked from the womb and thrown directly into a never-ending spanking machine made out of misused erections and deferred dreams. If I stretch my eye, I can see that there are a few perks that go with that extra X chromosome, but I can’t think of a single one that I covet. It’s simply a shit gig, the socio-sexual equivalent of working the drive-through window at McDonald’s. If you’re a guy, I figure the very least you can do is let the girls do their jobs and not yell too much when they get their orders wrong.

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