My god! Human contact for “barely a quarter of a second”! The horror!
Gonna need years of therapy to recover from so scarring an experience.

Ugh, I’m starting to feel that way with drinking, and it’s so awkward to tell people you don’t want to drink or, worse, “don’t drink.”  I never miss it when it’s not there, but if it is there, I drink habitually and robotically.  The trouble is, since I’ve naturally been drinking less and less, my tolerance is way,…

I haven’t given up weed yet, but I should. I think.

See I smoke week to counteract

You’re not interesting because you jerked off in front of women for decades. Why does that mean I have to listen to you? Why does that make you interesting. You didn’t get your career ruined by a vindictive creep. You spent 20 years harassing your colleagues and threatening them with retaliation and now I gotta…

I think you’ve got a few good examples of non-toxic masculinity to follow. I tell my single women friends who date men that they should be looking for a Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers), a Terry Crews, or a Nick Offerman. Men who, apparently in spite of “biology,” are able to treat women like human beings. These are men who…

“I have begun to believe that men see persistence as harmless, perfectly socially acceptable, even admirable.”

What gets me about entitlement is the perfect shield it forms against reality. Even when you told this guy, bluntly, that the whole rom-com performance was gross and scary and UNLIKABLE, he just tuned it out. Every single one of women’s objections can be slotted into guys like this responses, like a Choose Your Own…

When I was on OkCupid (which I call “OkStupid”), I used to get messages like that:

I didn’t want him to know where I lived so I stopped a block away and said, “Look, romcoms lied to you. I don’t like you. I think you’re a rude jerk who won’t leave me alone. I’m doing my best not to give you the impression I like you because I don’t. Please go home now.” The whole time he never took me seriously and…

“But the embarrassment that comes with being a woman can feel wholly inevitable: Being too forward; talking too much; not talking enough; seeming too shy; texting too soon; coming across like a bitch or coming across as too easy. For every overstep there’s the possibility I’ll lose ground just standing still. The fear…

For men, interactions with women are a zero-sum game. If she wins, he loses. He doesn’t want to be a loser, so in every encounter she has to lose in order to reaffirm his manhood.

Men feel like women should only feel beautiful if men tell them they are.

As a gay man, I can kind of (sort of) confirm that this is a behavioral trait shared by all men. The sense of entitlement - that self validation is inextricably tied to sexual conquest. That is not a blanket condemnation of the male sex, just an observation on the current state of ‘masculinity’ as it is interpreted…

I’m surprised he didn’t:

I’m a gay man but I have male and female friends. One thing I’ve noticed in talking with my guy friends about women is that, in general, men do not respect women.

Shudder.  I was followed home by strangers when I was in my 20s, and that was bad enough, but the combination of smugness and threat here is just so appalling.

When I was single, I remember talking politics with some guy I’d met at a party. He tried to call me out for something, and I sternly nailed him back with facts and data. I sincerely thought he was a jerk because of the way he smugly raised his objections to my argument and rolled his eyes. I walked away.

I often think about that one girl who when guys would text her “You are beautiful” she stopped demurring and would respond with “Yes, I know.” And the responses she would get would be amazing, in fact, down right hostile. Patriarchy doesn’t want women to be confident in any sort of arena—men make the rules, and the…

I’ve been happily out of the dating game for decades (and was terrible at it back when) but I’ve always thought the modern hetero iteration, and especially in New York City, is just awful and hugely favors men who get ego and sexual gratification from an endless string of casual dates with women, many of whom are…