It is imperative to my wellbeing that I may take this moment in time to stomp my digital footprint so deeply into the sands of the internet and explicitly express with my whole chest and two hands in plain writing just how much I truly fucking hate talking to men.
No allegories, no allusions, no indirects.
No symbolism, no literary devices, no tricks of linguistics.
The depravity of it all.
It’s tangible.
I can literally see it on and feel it beneath my skin.
I swear to god that my cheeks flush with visible yearning when I even begin to think about just how deeply I wish all men everywhere all at once would shut the fuck up forever. I wish their arid lips would remain sealed everlastingly. I wish they could not utter one single word unless explicitly commanded to by someone else, literally anyone else, who is not another man. I wish they had to fill out a 3,000 page form in triplicate before even CONSIDERING the idea of opening their mouth around me. Oh, and offering up any unsolicited opinions or ‘advice’ on literally any subject? DIRECTLY to the guillotine.
I simply cannot let it be unbeknownst to current and future generations just how predictable and unexceptional men are at conversation, and how the privilege of language and communication is so completely fucking wasted on them. I need so badly that there is an accessible discussion online that can live forever and verily express the deep disdain and full body disgust that women like me often feel upon interacting with men. The fact that I can’t find any other scalding essays on this topic is pretty unbelievable to me when I think about how objectively torturous it is to talk to men. Why are more people not discussing this? HELLOOOOOO?
Time and time again I must be the change I want to see, therefore it is my privilege and obligation to contribute to the (severely lacking) discourse on this topic.
Tormenting. Agonizing. Harrowing.
Not only is it humiliating and draining to engage in discussion with a man, but it also carries an inherent danger considering how many men are violent misogynists laying in wait. When a man speaks to me, it’s downright spine-chilling. The risky and delicate dance of feigning laughter at his “jokes” while at the same time trying to figure out if he’s a woman hating psycho, if his humor is rooted in bigotry, if he’s got resentment toward his mother, if he believes in women’s bodily autonomy ~ all for what? WHAT does it yield? WHAT is the reward of suffering through a conversation with a man? MORE RISK AND MORE CONVERSATION WITH A MAN? Release me, O Lord!
There is a finite limit of conversation I am willing and able to have with a man before the intrusive thoughts of fucking killing us both become too much to bear and I have to see myself out of the situation before I start seeing red.
A general level of curiosity leads me to want to engage in a certain amount of dialogue with people I am naturally interested in and/or drawn to - and this is my kryptonite. Unbeknownst to men, I have spontaneously abandoned a serenade on the pink karaoke machine with so many of them simply because I talked to them for two seconds too long and they said something that put me over the edge. You give a man an inch and he takes a mile. You ask a man one fucking question about literally anything and you get a three act soliloquy that always ends up circling back to something intended to infer that he’s such a standout guy. Such a funny guy. Such a smart guy. Such a good guy. Such a successful guy.
An outstanding difference between me and men is that I straight up stand ten toes down day after day and say that I fucking hate talking to men because it’s a waste of time and they piss me off. I do not believe in the everyman’s ability to say anything to me at any point in time, ever, that is going to enrich my life at all. This isn’t to say that I’m not open to the possibility of it happening, but I will say I do not believe that 99.9% of the men who approach me have the capacity to have a respectful and engaging exchange with me - and I’m not the gambling type, so I’d rather save my sanity (and possibly my life) and just pass on the entire interaction altogether.
Men often preface the topic of ‘talking to women’ with all this other holier than thou ~I’m a sapiosexual~ type of bullshit and put on this pretentious air of depth to try and reinforce the idea that men are “intellectual creatures”. Men will look you dead in your face and be like “A bimbo with fake tits? No thanks, I prefer a woman who I can actually have a conversation with,” or “I’m looking for a woman I can actually talk to,”- and this is where I fucking lose my mind. Please, tell me, Richard from Daly City who only speaks 1 language and hasn’t read a book since Diary of a Wimpy Kid in the 4th grade when he was forced to do a book report as extra credit to salvage his failing test scores - what topics and themes would you like to discuss but cannot because you are so inconvenienced by the redundant and monotonous droning of the women you encounter who only want to talk to you about ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’ things? It’s both nauseating and hilarious to watch men virtue signal and cosplay as ~people with depth~ while they pretend like a woman’s wit and intellect actually matters to them.
The fact that we are all just supposed to collectively pretend like men even have the wherewithal to have a genuine two way conversation with a woman and walk away knowing whether or not it was the least bit profound in any way leaves me absolutely flabbergasted every time I think about it. Men are so wrapped up in their preconceived (and patriarchally influenced) ideas of what a woman’s intellectual capabilities (or lack thereof) are, that it renders them fully incapable of any kind of actual authentic social exchange with a woman.
It’s painfully unsurprising to me that men have not yet figured out that you can “actually have a conversation” with any woman in the entire world that you can communicate with on a linguistic level, because they are all so busy tongue kissing their big nonfemale brains in the mirror. They expect to be revered as possessing an ‘expert’ level knowledge and ‘worldliness’ on any topic because they might happen to know a thing and are also not a woman. Despite the fact a woman will often possess the same (or higher) level of intelligence as a man, her intelligence is inherently worth less because it lives in her tiny stupid little female brain. Within the patriarchy, we are taught to believe that literally any man is smarter than literally every woman. Men have been socialized to believe that women only hold value if they are submissive and breedable, and anything that women do or possess that falls outside of these confines is not even worth acknowledging - it’s bothersome, even. And every man I meet seems completely unwilling to fully yield this belief and attempt mutually engage with me on any level deeper than wanting to fuck me or to punch me in the face.
My humor, my wit, my intellect, my joyous whimsy, all the best parts of me - are entirely lost on most of the men I meet. Men do not care about my accomplishments or my accolades. They do not care about my creative pursuits and my artistic goals. They do not care about the trials I have faced and survived and all of the adventures I’ve had in the far corners of the world. They do not care about my anecdotes and my stories. They do not know how to care - they never learned how to. They only care that I have a smoking hot body and can make a great breakfast.
It starts with little boys saying “I don’t know how to talk to girls,” growing up to be men who blame women for not being able to “hold a conversation”. No my brother in Christ, you simply never learned to regard women as three dimensional people whose unique and lived experiences are worth the same weight and importance as a man’s. If you do not struggle talking to other men in a respectful and engaged manner, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do the same for women. But wait! Would you look at that? It appears as if men don’t know how to fucking talk to one other either.
So…what’s the common denominator here?
Men who say they 'can’t talk to women’ for whatever reason are very loudly admitting two things; 1. that they do not have the capability/desire/intelligence to view other people outside of themselves as complex creatures capable of mutual verbal exchange 2. that they have nothing remarkable or worthwhile to say.
Any woman who has conversed with any number of men can tell you that conversation to men is often nothing more than a prolonged theater piece (that is somehow both over and under rehearsed) where he talks about himself for 30 minutes without stopping to even take a breath let alone to ask you one single thing about yourself. After the introductory monologue is over, the production typically goes one of four ways; a race to devalue a woman’s point of view/experience through a series of impromptu questioning, a patronizing pop quiz on niches and nuances of a common interest, an opportunity for him to ‘play devil’s advocate’, or simply a chance for him to continue pontificating half truths for a captive one woman audience. At any moment in a discussion, a man is either trying to fuck you or to insult you. There is no in between, and I refuse to continue to take part in the pageantry of it all.
Women are expected to possess all the traits that men themselves not only do not possess, but do not even have the power to discern. Men expect elegance, wit, humor, beauty, mindfulness, depth, from every woman on this planet when they themselves could never fathom to possess even 2 out of 6 of those characteristics at any single moment in this life or the next. A man wouldn’t know how to recognize a beautiful, clever, and imaginative woman if she spit in her hand and palmed him across both sides of the face. I’m absolutely so fucking sure that all of you sophisticated gentlemen would most definitely prefer the independent and highly educated woman with a razor sharp tongue who has read the Random House Encyclopedia in 6 languages cover to cover and can fact check you with no internet connection over the submissive, uneducated, and fully co-dependent girl with the ‘fake tits’ that you hate so much who is brimming with internalized misogyny and lives for male validation - and the piping hot tea is that a man will disrespect BOTH of these women just the same!
It doesn’t matter what the fuck you do! Do whatever the fuck you want! Be an idiot bimbo or be an intellectual! Tell knock-knock jokes or discuss global affairs! Fake an accent or bark like a dog! Tell him the truth about something or just straight up lie about everything! Literally who gives a shit! Men do not know the fucking difference or even care to see it!
BOYS! You want to actually hold a conversation? Let’s fucking hold it then! Except not a single one of you is equipped with the skills to actually hold jackshit else other than your doofy little dinghy for yet another disappointing late night of whitewater wristing to the same women that you continuously debase, disregard, and disrespect for not ‘being able’ to offer you ‘actual conversation’, 🫵 you fucking bums 🫵.
This is the best thing I have ever read in my 40 years of life, full stop. PREACH IT, SCREAM IT, SING IT FROM THE MOUNTAINTOPS!
honestly this is where i want feminism/womens movements to go. no more "we need men too" no. we do not. the best man i know is still the most mediocre and terrible woman i know. let them rot. (they yearn for the rot anyways based on any mindnumbingly heinous conversation ive ever had with them.) why is anyone still trying to drag men along with us when they're lightyears behind the average 14 year old girl? why are we no child left behind-ing grown men? the disease cannot also be the cure.