Men

Men are stupid.

Ok, I know this is an awful way to start, but nevertheless I’m going to. I mean it in a specific sense though, not just in a childish exasperation sort of a way because I’m an angry feminist (which I’m not really – I am angry and feminist, but separately not together), or because I’ve been wolf-whistled at or something silly like that.

I’m talking about the lack of thought and general analysis that men give to things before they jump right in and make decisions. I could cite any number of things that are affected by this, but this time, I suppose I’m talking about relationships. More specifically, I guess, when you boil it down, I’m talking about sex.

Most of you are probably already rolling your eyes because you all know this but just hear me out ok.

So, what happened was that, quite recently I was asked out. Not a horrendous experience you may think, although it doesn’t really happen to me very often and I never really know what to do about it when it does. Because when I get asked out it always seems to come out of the blue and from people I hardly know and who hardly know me.

This time it was the postman.

Now, you might think I’m overreacting, but for the postman to ask me out while he was handing me my morning mail seemed grossly inappropriate to me and, while other women would, I’m sure, have been flattered, I just became convinced at first glance that the guy must be a nut. I mean, aside from anything else, I have hardly ever seen him before and, before he asked me out, I actually do not recall a time when I have seen or spoken to him at all. Who notices the postman right? Normally he leaves the mail in a little box outside the block of flats I live in and I don’t have to see him at all.

So just how the hell can he possibly have been gearing up to ask me out? As if we’d been having some sort of ongoing acquaintanceship for a while and he’d been gradually sizing me up to decide that he liked me. (This was more or less what he admitted to me when he asked the offending question.) It just seemed to me that he had randomly decided that, without any sort of thought on the subject. You know what I mean?

And when I think back over all the guys who have ever asked me out, it seems that all of them decided the same way. Men don’t think much about how they feel do they? Or not in my experience of them anyway. If they’re attracted to someone, or if they like someone and want to see them again, it’s a kind of an instinctive thing; they just go on appearance . . . maybe. (But then this makes no sense to me either because I’m not actually very good looking – I mean I’m not hideous but, you know . . . I’m human, I don’t look great first thing in the morning.)

Women, if they’re anything like me, do not tend to act on impulse and like to analyze whether things are right or not. Which is why it’s always best, I think, to actually know the person who’s asking you out and to have had some kind of conversation or friendship beforehand – because otherwise they could be anyone, right? And how can you possibly make any sort of informed decision about how you feel when you don’t know who you’re feeling it about?

As you can see I don’t subscribe to the “Love at First Sight” thing, that is assuming it’s even love we’re talking about; is there such a thing as lust at first sight, do you think? Probably. And it’s probably more common than the other option. But, either way, I just don’t get it.

I don’t get how men can be so monumentally stupid that they think it’s flattering to profess some sort of affinity with a total stranger.

I was once sent a Valentine’s card from a guy who my mother picked up in the DSS (Social Security) office – I don’t mean picked up as “picked up” I just mean she met him and brought him home for tea. My mother does strange things like that with total strangers. Anyway, when I opened this card I found a note telling me how beautiful he thought I was and how he wished we could be friends. He also included his phone number and an “I hope you call”. Desperation multiplied to the Nth degree there I think.

The attention in itself might have been fine, except that he was one of my mother’s mentally ill friends and he had only met me once for about two minutes, during which time I scowled at him almost constantly and refused to say a word to him because I could see, on sight, he was a total creep. My mother did, eventually, take it upon herself to explain that he had just been made redundant and was clinically depressed and she had brought him home because she thought he would be a friend for both of us. (Yeah, she has weird ideas. I mean, the guy could really have been a serial killer or a rapist for all she knew.)

But what really bothered me, and still bothers me now really, was the nagging question of how he managed to make up his mind that he liked me, and how all the men who ask me out on dates seem to decide that they like me, because they have no criteria for it usually. They don’t know me. Often they just sort of sidle up to me at bus stops or, I remember, one guy actually rode his bike past me one day while I was walking up the street to the shops and asked me, en route, if I would give him my phone number – not in a loud voice or as a random quip, but casually as if we’d already been having a conversation and with the full expectation of an answer. People seem to think that I’m approachable this way. Why I have no idea because I’m as hostile towards other people as it’s possible to be! It’s a manner I’ve cultivated over many years of trying to get people to leave me alone.

I’m not being unfair here. I just have to be wary of nutcases, because they so often seem to target me. As if I’m easy prey! Now, if a guy wants to be my friend – and I HAVE had friends who were men before now . . . I still have some, in fact . . . then that’s great. I’ve got no problem with that. Because that means that they want to get to know me and they are prepared to find out all about me as we wind our way through our friendship; and it gives me a chance to find out if they’re nuts before I decide about how far I want them to be a part of my life.

Case in point: I have had a male friend for the last ten years who has come to know me very well and he’s very dear to me, but when I met him – which happened almost as abruptly and accidentally as my “meeting” with the postman and my mother’s nutty friend – I informed him straight away that I only wanted to be friends because I was wary of new and sudden relationships and I didn’t want to get into that. And he accepted it, totally, because he had other girls he could go out with and he just wanted someone to talk to who liked all the same stuff he liked. So that was our friendship. He only told me he loved me a few months back – and I don’t think he meant it quite that way, it was a much deeper, friendlier sort of a thing – but that kind of meant something. It felt natural.

But I don’t like this thoughtless throwing around of liking and interest that most men do. They see a girl who looks pretty to them, or who looks like she might sleep with him or . . . I don’t know, whatever, and that’s it, they’re away. They just try their luck. And I don’t ever see it coming.

Someone explain to me how men are unable to see that they are not going to find anything deep, meaningful or even remotely worthwhile by just picking up random strangers and expecting to have a great time. That’s just stabbing in the dark. If you find love that way it’ll be a bloody miracle. And I just don’t believe in those. It doesn’t happen that way for most people, just like most people who play the lottery don’t win. The odds are just stacked against it and you’ve got to think sensibly about what you’re going to do.

Me, I’ve never been big on the idea of falling in love. I am one of those rare, possibly very screwed up people who would be quite happy to end up alone and have a small, quiet life, rather than have to deal with the bad habits, constant needs and dirty socks of some man who, according to society, I need to make me complete.

I don’t feel like I want that. I don’t want to fall in love. Or be married. Or have children. And that’s me. Anyone of my friends who tries to set me up on a blind date will no longer be my friend. And they all know that. Or at least I think and hope they do.

It’s just not what I want.

So maybe when I’m faced with all this dating malarkey forced on me by happy-go-lucky guys who, basically, just want to get laid, I take it a little bit personally. It just makes me angry, the presumption that someone like me is fair game when I’m just here, minding my own business and not asking anyone for anything. It’s like they don’t even think I’ve got a personality, I’m just a pretty pair of eyes or a pair of tits or something. Well, I don’t know what they look at really, but I assume it’s something like that, and most of these guys haven’t even said one word to me before they’ve come up and started asking for my phone number. And it’s not even in a bar or a club or something, where you expect that sort of shit, it’s in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, in broad daylight, when I’m just going about my business!

So this is where I came in. Men are stupid. They don’t think. They just leap at the first available opportunity and hope for the best, and then when it all turns to shit they just move on. Women are the ones who think about love, sex, relationships and all that. We’re the ones who work out the logistics and decide on what is sensible, or not. It’s us who have to consider where we’re going to end up when we accept a date with one of these guys.

It seems, to me, to work a little bit like precognition. Because as soon as the guy has finished asking me the question I’m already thinking about all the horrors of the potential relationship I might have with that person. Meeting his family, fitting in with his friends who I probably won’t like, finding out what he likes and pretending, for the sake of appearances and ingratiating myself with him, that I like them too. All that stress and mess and fuss, and for what? Just so I can decide in the end that I never really liked him anyway and move on to somebody else? No.

Something about that just does not seem necessary or worth it to me. Other people disagree, I know. They talk about taking a gamble and seeing where it comes out. But I’m a pessimist, I guess. I expect that most things are not going to work out well and I believe in trusting my instincts. Instincts are good things and, if I know from the outset that it’s only going to be hard work and stress, then why should I bother?

But try and explain that to a man and they look at you as if you’re crazy because, as far as they’re concerned, they’ve only asked you out for dinner. They’re still in the moment, they’re not thinking ahead. And they don’t want to either.

Like I said, it doesn’t happen to me often so I don’t want anyone to think I’m bragging about beating people off with a stick, because I’m really not. But sometimes I wonder if the slightly hostile, put-offish manner that I tend to adopt around men doesn’t just encourage them more, because they think it’s so interesting that I’m not clamouring for their attention – when in fact I am just trying to avoid their attention so I can live my life.

Why does everything always have to be about this?

I like to think that I’m out of that particular rat-race and that the obsessive love-chase that everyone else seems to be embarked on just doesn’t apply to me, but then I am surprised, continually, to find that other people still think it does apply to me and that there is a feeling amongst other people that I must be co-opted into all this nonsense for the benefit of someone else.

I am a prize, it seems (although what kind of prize I have no clue!)

Nevertheless, I will not be won.

And, I maintain – childish and overly simplistic as it might be . . .

Men are stupid!


N.B. I am not a lesbian, a man-hater, or a nutcase (well, I don’t think so on that last one :-/). I am quite happy to explain this to people if they want to know and I don’t subscribe to all that, “I don’t need to define myself for people” stuff, because I will. I don’t see why not. I am, if anything, a largely asexual fantasist with an overall hatred of reality and the ability, on and off, to fall in love with fictional and completely implausible men. Other people can have the real ones. I am only ever disappointed by how little they have to offer.

That is all.