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white trash males being the one minority it is still socially acceptable to vilify,
it sounded as if the male sex drive and marriage were incompatible. Something had to give, and usually what gave was honesty. These guys either lied to their wives about going to strip clubs, or at the very least they lied about the ubiquity of their sexual fantasies involving other women.
Or maybe trying to police the *fantasies* of your partner is an example of toxic monogamy. Just a thought.
I’d never made friends with guys like that before. They had intimidated me too much, and the sexual tension that always subsists in some form or another between men and women had usually gotten in the way.
This is an odd statement; doubly so for coming from a lesbian woman.
“Look, if you still don’t believe me, let’s go in the bathroom and I’ll show you.” “No thanks,” he blurted, jerking away from me. “I don’t wanna see that
Here he explicitly says he does NOT want to see ...
When we reached our cars I shouted back to him, “Hey, Jim.” When he turned around I pulled up my sweatshirt and my sports bra and flashed him the telltale tits. “See. I told you so.” He winced and turned away. “Jesus, you fuckin’ freak. I don’t need to see that shit.
... and yet she flashes him anyway. It's presented as fun, but it'd be seen as downright abusive if gender-reversed.
As they had with Jim, things changed completely after that with the guys. Everybody loosened up and opened up. Everybody liked Norah much more than Ned, even knowing that I was a dyke dressed as a man.
Their friendship had sure boundaries of touch, affection and expression, and as a woman I could break through those blocks as quickly and effortlessly as I had changed my sex.
“What are most guys looking for in a woman? We’re not looking for a nice person. We’re not looking for someone to rear our children. We’re not looking for someone who’s going to pitch in and be a good worker and contribute to the household. A guy is looking for a woman to fuck him. We want someone we can stick our dicks into all the time. That’s ninety-five percent of looking for a woman. And there’s no explaining that to anyone.”
Misandrist crap.
The act wasn’t new to me, of course, but it was detached from the necessary precursors: emotion, seduction, imagination, mental connection—the things that are, perhaps, the hallmarks of female sexuality,
More like the hallmarks of romantic sexuality generally, regardless of gender.
course, I was in for a mountain of rejections, and the self-hatred that came with being the sad sack pick-up artist, the wooing barnacle that every woman is forever flicking off her sleeve. Sadly, that’s how it went for Ned most of the time at first when he tried to meet strange women in singles bars. As I would soon learn, that’s how it went for most guys.
“Rejection is a staple for guys,” said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. “Get used to it.” That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would never come.
Seeing how protected she seemed, I remembered how protective of myself I had often been in encounters with strange men. I had always made the same assumption,
I always knew or thought I knew what he was after. I had, I realized, treated most men with the same coldness that these women were showing me.
There I was, caught square in the middle of the oldest plot in the world: he said/she said. It was the woman’s job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy’s job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all.
Then again, many of the women I met weren’t emotional giants either, nor were they particularly well adjusted or stable. They just considered themselves to be such. And even the ones who knew they were damaged seemed to feel entitled to expect stolidity from a man, as if, in the time-honored way of things, a man is supposed to be strong, to hold things together for his woman, to hold her up when she can’t do it herself.
She had chosen to get involved with someone who was unavailable, yet she blamed him for refusing to leave his wife. He was the cad, the coward. She was the long-suffering party, the helpmeet waiting in the wings, the used one who deserved better. Her predicament was of her own making and entirely predictable, yet she used it to bolster her distrust of the opposite sex, and as with many of the other women I dated, Ned took that accumulated load on his shoulders from the start. He was just the next man who would hurt her.
Their refusal to see men as individuals, and more importantly to see their initial encounters with them as tabulae rasae, doomed them from the start.
“Many men honestly do not know what women want and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.” Yet the opposite is equally true, though less often discussed publicly. A lot of the women I met didn’t know, didn’t understand or didn’t appear to care what a lot of the men in their lives wanted, either.
Perhaps women have been guilty of hubris in this regard. We think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don’t on all counts.
But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn’t there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.
When I started the project, I had suspected that I would find hordes of women for whom Ned would be the ideal man, the ideal man being essentially a woman, or a woman in a man’s body. But I was wrong about this.
And if you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men.
I pronounced the words “effeminate” and “gay” haltingly, trying to soften the blow. Could he possibly not know he was gay? Or was it just the terminology he hadn’t heard before?
Or could he just NOT be gay? It's incredibly arrogant to claim to know better than someone themselves whether or not they are gay.
Watching and listening for only a short time, I could see how rigid and inept most of them were at relating to each other, and why by contrast I stuck out so sorely.
.. right ..
Most of the monks, he said, were incapable of talking about their feelings with each other, or for that matter discussing anything more than sports and the weather. They were typical guys in that respect.
Those are not traits of typical guys.
I had to shed my sympathy for myself and the victim, and the appearance of weakness and need. People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out.
On its mantel Paul had placed the group’s talismans, one of which was—lamentably enough—a large, crudely carved wooden penis.
Why is that "lamentable" in a world where pussy and vagina is used all over the map among women's groups?
We needed men not to be needy, and so they weren’t. But, of course, ultimately we did need and want them to be needy, to express their feelings and be vulnerable. And they needed that, too. They needed permission to be weak, and even to fail sometimes. But somewhere in there the signals usually got crossed or lost altogether, which often left both men and women feeling unfulfilled, resentful and alone.
“Every time I come into a room or a restaurant,” Toby continued, “especially with other guys, I can see the fear on their faces, like they think I’m going to hurt them. They assume I’m violent because of the way I look.” He had a point. Was this really any less insulting than presuming every blonde to be a bimbo?
Being Atlas was about being the guy who takes care of all the pesky logistical (and often fiscal) hassles so that daily life can run smoothly. It meant worrying so that the wife and kids didn’t have to.
The guys felt profoundly responsible for the women in their lives, to give sustenance primarily, but more importantly—and yes, in this sense, chivalry is most emphatically not dead—to “take the pain so that she wouldn’t have to.” The drive among these guys to save and protect women—and this drive was truly visceral—astounded me.
what to do about it? I can hardly write those words and defend them. Men’s liberation isn’t a platform you can run on, even if it is the last frontier of new age rehabilitation: the oppressor as oppressed. In our age we feel no political sympathy for “man,” because he has been the conqueror, the rapist, the warmonger, the plutocrat, the collective nightmare sitting on our chest.
Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are—here is the dreaded word—victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role. From the feminist point of view this sounds at best like an abdication of responsibility, an easy out for the inventor, and at worst an infuriating instance of blaming the true victim.
Being a victim is far less practicable politically when the victimizer is also you, and the rending yoke is self-imposed. Can anybody really march the streets crying j’accuse and mea culpa in the same breath? Can you be “The Man” and the rebel at the same time? Not in our revolution, pal.
It was hard being a guy. Really hard. And there were a lot of reasons for this, most of which, when I recount them, make me sound like a tired and prototypical angry young man. It’s not exactly a pose I relish. I used to hate that character,
I had thought that by being a guy I would get to do all the things I didn’t get to do as a woman, things I’d always envied about boyhood when I was a child: the perceived freedoms of being unafraid in the world, stamping around loudly with my legs apart. But when it actually came to the business of being Ned I rarely felt free at all.
And it wasn’t being found out as a woman that I was really worried about. It was being found out as less than a real man, and I suspect that this is something a lot of men endure their whole lives, this constant scrutiny and self-scrutiny. Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children.
Women were hard to please in this respect. They wanted me to be in control, baroquely big and strong both in spirit and in body, but also tender and vulnerable at the same time, subservient to their whims and bunny soft. They wanted someone to lean on and hold on to, to look up to and collapse beside, but someone who knew his reduced place in the postfeminist world nonetheless. They held their presumed moral and sexual superiority over me and at times tried to manipulate me with it.
As a guy you get about a three-note emotional range. That’s it, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance, and now after black bra feminism, we even get vitriol, too. We get to be bitches, at least some of the time, and people write proud books about it. But guys get little more than bravado and rage. Forget doubt. Forget hurt. They take punches. They take care of business. And their intestines liquefy under the stress.
I believe we are that different in agenda, in expression, in outlook, in nature, so much so that I can’t help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects.
She believes this -- and that's pretty clear throughout the book. She doesn't ever really make any attempt to justify this belief though.
Boys have the sensitivity routinely mocked and shamed and beaten out of them, and the treatment leaves scars for life. Yet we women wonder why, as men, they do not respond to us with more feeling. Actually, we do more than that. We blame and disdain them for their heartlessness.
