2008-01-02
So THAT'S What a Misogynist Looks Like!
I recently met someone and have been involved with him for the past few weeks. Supposedly it was great.
He was a little boring but as my friend said upon giving her seal of approval, "Opposites attract for a reason. He's stable. You draw him out a bit, he'll reign you in a bit."
I thought this guy was great. He is focused, educated, and his career is one of compassion. He was physically interesting to me and he was into the same things I am into. He understood a lot of my oddities and was delighted by them rather than seeing them as imperfections.
Walking by an art show at a local little restaurant, he seemed like he wanted to stop in. I really, really, really didn't want to. Suffice it to say that I had my reasons.
"Oh! This must be _____. Want to stop in?"
"No."
"Awesome! Not enough people are that able to be that honest. No hesitation, just: No. I like that about you Sarah."
True dat.
I am honest.
I was totally honest when I told him to today to stay the hell away from me, my hang-outs, and that I was pretty sure he was a misogynist of the first order.
His dishonesty with me earned him that, and then some.
Witness:
It all sort of started unfolding Friday. He confessed that he had been in a relationship earlier in the year with a woman to whom he was very attracted. The relationship was never consummated. I asked some questions, felt it out and although he was adamant he no longer had those feelings, I knew a little better.
Now, this isn't necessarily a problem. It's one of those things that at my age, when someone talks about an ex a couple weeks into dating, it could be simple nostalgia. It really depends on the situation and the context.
Here, I decided to wait until the next day or so to pronounce judgment.
He was either going to keep thinking about the ex, which you can see in a man's eyes by the way they move a million miles away from you when he's telling you how much he likes you; or he was only bringing her up because it made sense to contextually.
I had to get over Someone this year, too and my Someone was the other party in a relationship that was consummated millions of times over the course of a decade of knowing each other. Getting over people can happen. I can mention my Someone because not being in love with him anymore is new and exciting. I can understand that others might feel these same things with their Someones.
Anyway, he was adament that he no longer had feelings for her. I got that I still wasn't sure this was the truth but I somehow totally missed that he not only wasn't over his Someone but that he also had major, ugly issues about women and was totally prepared - nay, exicted - to bring me into the mess.
He took me to a party at her house.
On the second date.
When we went to this party, I had NO IDEA that the staring and the awkwardness was not related to how sweaty I generally am or to the general appraisal that friends give to the potential amour of one of their own.
No, I can only assume that although I was as sweaty as ever, the staring was also not because because of my incredible rack or terrific smile.
His Someone and her friends stared at me like that because it was un-fucking-comfortable for everyone. But me. ME, who's thinking that I am the only one in the room feeling some normal nerves or something. ME, who's thinking I was being welcomed and checked out for future friend-of-friend things and corner girly conversations at bigger parties. ME having no idea what was really going on was that I was being cuckholded in some fucked up game that had nothing to do with me. ME in a sadistic nightmare and not even knowing it.
Later in the evening, after making out, he told me it was maybe the best date he's ever had.
I actually agreed, completely and totally cluelessly.
I had no idea that we were not talking at ALL about the same date.
We were on completely different dates that night.
Mine was innocent and curious. His was careless and cruel.
It gets so much better though.
Ready?
Let's go.
Family?
STOP READING IMMEDIATELY
You do NOT want to read what I am going to say next but there is simply no other way to say it.
.
.
.
.
Time passes and we're dating, we're dating, it's fun, we're dating, we talk frankly about getting physical, we make out hard-core, he freaks the fuck out.
Whoa.
He freaks so far out that he has the effect of making me feel like an asshole for a minute.
I was totally frank.
I said I wouldn't do it if it was going to be weird. We agreed he's very sensitive.
He pushed my head down.
Sensitive, it turns out, only to his own sensitivity.
Which is sort of like the penultimate asshole state of disgrace: "I am soooooo sensitive.
When it comes to my feelings.
Please comfort me for how much I hurt over how I've hurt you.
Be sensitive to my short-comings (Cummings. Whatever. I told you to stop earlier, Family.)
I want to like that you're a Dirty Whore but I just can't. I thought I could but I can't."
I think if my head has ever threatened to blow (pun intended) out enough steam so that my eyeballs would pop straight out of their sockets, my ears would disintegrate, and my neck would be left a stumpy bloody mess while my head rolls around several feet out of the reach of my arms, it would have been Friday afternoon when he EMAILED me to tell me that the implications of a brief blow-job are just too great for him to bear.
The implication being that I am a Dirty Whore and he is too sensitive to be the boyfriend or a Dirty Whore. The Dirty Whore Response. Classic, although not usually so dramtic and creepy. Normally, a guy who's afraid at first of women or sex finds that he can work very successfully through the Dirty Whore Response. And at our age, if a man can't appreciate a woman in touch with her inner Dirty Whore than there's something wrong with him. Not only did he ask for, receive, and the reject on the basis of the original request but we haven't even gotten to the public humiliation part of this disaster yet and no, I'm not talking about the usual public humiliation I experience which is usually brought on by my own dumbassery.
Scene: New Year's Eve.
I am at my friends' and we are getting fucked the fuck up.
It gets to be 11:15 and we decide to go the distance with the substance abuse and not go out to the team bar. We were pretty messy at that point, it was just as well that we stayed home.
Meanwhile: At the team bar.
He walks in with his ex-girlfriend, who my friends do not know as his ex. In reality, I didn't even know it until yesterday. My friends just think he's got a date. Had I been there, I would have thought, "She's just his friend! I've been to her party! it's not waht you guys think!".
Fucking clueless over here, and I do not love that feeling. It's bad enough my friends think he's out on a date 2 hours after he dumped me but the fact is that I would have lept up to say, "NO She's not a DATE!" Because I wouldn't have known. That she was. A date. All along.
Anyway, my friends spy them walking in. They know him; they do not know her.
They also watch as he proceeds to dance and make out with his ex-lady.
They know that this guy had dumped me earlier in the afternoon for being a Dirty Whore and they know that here he is with a date on New Year's Eve. They are smart and so they are concerned for his safety because they know I do not care for being humiliated publicly and that I can be a self-righteous asshole.
She actually hooked up with some OTHER guy and he went home alone.
See, I know this from two sources - my friends who called me the next day and also from him who felt like I needed to know for some fucked up reason I will never understand.
Take a minute to put the maneuverings in order:
1. He dumps me for being a Dirty Whore.
2. I tell all my friends.
3. Same day as #1 and 2 above, he takes a date to a New Year's party that's being help at my team's home bar.
4. All those friends I told? Work there or are drinking there that night.
5. He dances and kissy-kisses with her all night or until
6. She meets some other guy and then later
7. He informs me that his date was actually his Someone and that I've been to a party at her house? Remember?
What?
All I can think right now is, "I hate you."
I joke here and I paint myself as the fool who never gets attention from men or who is so sweaty and weird as to be unappealing to men but that fact is that I'm a force of nature. I intimidate a lot of men. I'm larger than life. Some of them want me because of it, like I'm a conquest for them; the best want me in spite of it and still others turn and run the other direction because they think I'm trouble.
"It's that look in your eye," I've been told.
I would love to admit this is some romanticized version of myself and that the sweaty piggish girl I write about is the same woman doing the writing.
In 2007, nine men told me that I was the total package, the babe of the century. Something has started to change in me. I'm starting to believe them, these tried and trusted men I've known many years with their heavy compliments matching what my girlfriends have said forever.
Where I am going with that is to say that I don�t see any fuckery I might have done to bring this on.
I was open, careful, honest, and clear with my communications and my intention.
I asked specific questions and took specific precautions.
But this guy snuck around with a secret the size of Montana and lurked until he found what piece he could break off.
He broke off a chunk of my dignity and the more I think about it, the more I think about how the only way it all makes sense is if he is a true misogynist.
He made a comment about roller derby and how it's mainly about the ruffled panties, which is the opposite of what it's mainly about. The panties are the least important aspect in my league. The sport is the thing in TRD.
He said, "You have to admit it's a little seedy."
I was thinking about how that comment had bugged me and how I was going to probe it a little more.
Now I realize that his comment about my sport is the reason he treated me so disrespectfully.
He doesn't think of women as anything more than sexual objects. There are the ones he can might be able to have and they are Dirty Whores or there are the ones he can't have and he is confused, maybe jealous of them. Roller derby would have to be mostly about the burlesque spectacle to this guy because he has completely objectified women. He is only there for the panties and assumes that we are only there for to show him our underwear.
Pretty sick, isn't it?
When you dissect it and think deeply about it?
Men who deeply hate women, and believe me, this guy has some issues that I'm not even naming here.
I don�t know when they started, why they exist and I don't need to know.
But what I do know is that the more I look at his in theme and content, the more I see that I may have just stumbled across the first genuine misogynist I've ever known.
Even the idiot assholes I have been with have never treated me with less consideration.
I mean, I have dated some serious losers. Drunken losers, mean losers, dumb losers... not ALL of the men I have dated were losers but as far as losers go, I have been with several models over the years.
A loser is jut someone to walk away from. There's rarely fall-out that's anything beside hilarious.
But this�. This is something different.
This is a person who's so far up in his head that he is unable to be trusted at any level.
This is a person who seems to be that far in his head because, at least in part, his actual clinical hatred of my gender has frozen him in ways you or I could never even imagine. He went out of his way to lie and to bring a powerful woman down to her knees, literally. Then he humiliated her in public and saw nothing wrong with his actions... because of the issues I won't do the indignity of naming.
Whether he was acting consciously or not, that's what happened, and it is not okay.
It is just not okay for someone to act that way.
Ah, sidenote?
Don�t worry about me�. He got his and then some.
Just�.. Trust me on that, okay?
arizonasarah at 11:30 a.m.