Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

This was the male ally they preferred: not the intellectual who challenged them as equals in an open dialogue, but this muscle-confused sasquatch. They’re all happy to hide behind patriarchy when it suits them. He snatches up his READ MORE WOMEN tote bag and leaves.

He got everything he wanted, and she got nothing. Less than nothing: she’s forced to choose between self-respect and peace of mind, when each requires the other, so it is a choice between nothing and nothing.

everything she says, whether she’s being funny or not, it turns out he’s the kind of guy who’s only fully engaged when she’s talking about her pain, who subtly steers conversations in that direction, because it furnishes an opportunity for him to demonstrate caring, which is not the same as caring.

Then she thinks of all the other pathetic podcasts by and for people like her, with the same tastes and worldview and craving for recognition, and the same impulse to commodify them, varying only in degrees of shamelessness, polish, and reach, the outcome in every case to make their audience even lonelier. Podcast subscriptions are a numerical measure of loneliness, she thinks. Everyone just listens to the voice that makes them feel least alone, and the lonely are the easiest to manipulate.

In this way, before I learned gender was fluid, I’d learned it was liquid.

For all people claim to hate being stereotyped, they love doing it to themselves, even better when someone they admire does it to them, they’re dying to be issued their personhood so they can pursue it without hesitation, hence astrology and personality quizzes. Sociologists will tell you that in-group and out-group discourses serve different functions, but does that make them any less reductive? (Mix emic and etic, you get an emetic.)

Along similar lines I have this theory that all the leering and coveting and jacking off that happens in front of screens has turned them into libidinal tunnels. And it’s almost endearing how people are so transparently their child selves online, how irrespective of content or sophistication the subtext is always Look at me and How dare you, and the sub-subtexts Who am I and Save me. No better place to find people when the people I wanted to find were people who, like me, wanted to find people who don’t want to be found. People like me, who like people who don’t like people like me.