When my girlfriend is trying to impress another guy that she’s working with, she doesn’t call me while she’s with him (I have to call her), and she generally doesn’t call me sweetie if I call and she answers (i.e. “Hi!” instead of “Hi, sweetie!”)
Then, once greetings are over, when trying to impress another guy she speaks more loudly and quickly than usual, full of a kind of professional confidence (like a real estate agent or other suit), and often laughs heartily at things that he’s saying in the background while I’m on the phone (something she rarely does when talking to me and there is no-one, or just other women, in the background).
At such times, she doesn’t join in the conversation by venturing anything, i.e. it always turns into me asking twenty questions or deciding to launch into a soliloquy (which I usually don’t do, because it’s very clear that she would rather end the conversation quickly, so when I do start talking unlaterally, it definitely feels like a passive-aggressive move on my part to force her to stay on the line even though it’s clearly embarassing her to have a boyfriend calling at that particular moment).
After every question I ask on such occassions, she gives a one- or two-word answer, then pauses, and follows it with “Yup,” or sometimes two of them (“Yup, yup,” or even three, “Yup… Yup, yup.”), a word she rarely uses otherwise (and only in other situations in which she’d rather the conversation ended sooner rather than later, as though she has some subconscious sense that adding more of them will hasten the call’s end).
Then, when I acquiesce and say “I suppose I’ll let you go,” if she’s trying to impress another guy she’ll just say, “Okay, bye,” or in some cases, “Okay, I’ll call you later,” but the goodbyes are very fast and involve only one query (“I’ll let you go”) and one response (“Okay”) rather than the two or more instances of back-and-forth greeting that usually accompany call-ends.
I can usually guarantee on such occasions that she will not call me again during the day; if she calls, it will be late right before she goes to bed, and there is also a much higher chance on such days that she will not call and will tell me the next day, “I was going to call you, but I fell asleep.” So after hanging up in situations like this I always have the uneasy disappointment that goes with knowing that there won’t be any real conversation that day, and if I want any further contact at all, I’ll probably have to initiate it… and that if I try, there is a much greater chance that I’ll fail because she simply won’t answer her phone.
I know I’m supposed to chalk it all up to “women spreading their wings” and all that shit. It’s not like I haven’t experienced this before with every other girlfriend I’ve ever had… but dammit, I don’t care. I AM HERE. I don’t disappear as a person once some other reasonably attractive guy stumbles into the room. Women don’t put up with their men looking at or trying to impress other women when they’re hanging out together, so I don’t see why I should have to put up with it.
In every relationship I’ve ever had, there are these moments when I realize just how pitiful a guy has to be to even care. It makes me feel like a pitiful loser and a real chump. I should just be using and abusing women and pretending to listen to them while I bang them silly and forget their names.
I wish I wasn’t so keyed into all of these kinds of signals, because they hurt me, and at the same time, I’m sure she doesn’t even realize they’re there. It would be so much easier and less difficult to cope with if I didn’t, either.
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I don’t trust women. I don’t trust women in general. I’ve been burned too many times. Women want us to trust them, and want to claim to be trustworthy, but the thing is, women file betrayals under feminist-style autonomy and feel justified in them. You go from “I would never hurt you, why don’t you trust me?” to a surprise “It’s MY body and MY life and you have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can do with them.” If you call them on it by saying, “You said I could trust you!” they just come back with, “Stop trying to control me! Women aren’t property! I didn’t betray you and I still haven’t, this is me making autonomous decisions as a person, not hurting you, if you can’t cope with me making my own decisions about my own body, maybe it’s you that’s hurting yourself!”
They seem not to understand that men are autonomous beings, too, and that if we are upset it’s not because we are trying to tell them what to do but because we are just as devastated as they can feel at the hands of a man and are trying to salvage some of our emotional investment just as they would and do. I think that’s the real failing of feminism: instead of setting women up as complete beings with hopes, dreams and feelings alongside men, it posits men as nefarious sex monsters without any hopes, dreams and feelings of their own that simply try to oppress and rape women. If women can’t rape and pillage as they see fit regardless of the effects on other people, they are sure that it’s because we are trying to control them, rather than because we are fighting for our lives to not have to all go and commit suicide en masse due to the emotional havoc they have wreaked.
And of course I can hear the chorous of all the women I know responding, “DO IT. The world would be a better place without all of you men.”
Sometimes I think we should all go and kill ourselves as a gender, as a passive-aggressive way of hurting them back. It would be so delicious if every time a girl dumped a guy or cheated on a guy, he killed himself and left that on her conscience for the rest of her life. I bet women won’t be so quick to say “Men should be DEAD!” if that were to start happening.
The feminist movement has humanized women by dehumanizing men, rather than humanizing us both.
