Rejection, p.3
Rejection, page 3
He waits out on the muggy sidewalk until his name is called, and at the entrance, a fleet of strollers exits the restaurant through the narrow vestibule. He flattens against the plastic wall to let two, three, four strollers pass, then tries to enter the restaurant when a fifth woman approaches, pushing an enormous three-wheeler with BMX tires and a crusty-eyed newborn scrunched inside it. He expects her to let him through, but instead she pushes the vestibule door open and he feels and hears a crack, looks down at his leather sandals and sees his big toenail folded up at an astonishing angle, says, Ow ow ow. Rather than apologize, she trades an eyeroll with her husband, who says, “Buddy, she can’t get through if you don’t move back.”
Your convenience doesn’t outweigh mine, he asserts to the father, I have an equal right to be here, plus you damaged my foot. Instead of replying, the father pushes him by the shoulder out onto the sidewalk, again violating his bodily autonomy.
Being civil and slow to anger, he says nothing, even as fury chain-reacts down through his chest. The strollers recede to the end of the block, spanning the sidewalk’s whole width, and now, first limping then sprinting, he catches up to them and (carelessly, with his injured foot) delivers a solid righteous side-stomp to one of the strollers’ chassis. The mother catches it before it tips over, and he serves another wild kick before shooting off through traffic across the street. Their shouts degrade into noise as he rounds the corner at a hobbled gallop, and he makes sure they hear him laugh.
At home, legs trembling full of acid, grimacing, he peels off his bloody broken half toenail. The wound looks like a cut pomegranate and he dabs it with alcohol, adding injury to injury, the pain piercing an opening inside him through which more tearful laughter escapes. He does feel somewhat guilty about what he did, yet he will not deny that it felt so, so good to ruin the evenings of the tyrannical assholes who loved to dehumanize innocent single narrow-shouldered men. Just a quick startle, no harm done. Actually, he’s the one who was harmed. The only thing that bothers him is that he knows no one would condone what he did.
More years pass, all alike. Something goes wrong in the bathroom: it was not a levator spasm after all. His doctor repeatedly assures him it is not a death sentence but will require significant immediate changes to his lifestyle. The diagnosis clears his head like a window continuously opening. Finally, it’s happened: they’ve killed him. He might as well be dead already. It is now certain he’ll never get the one thing he’s ever wanted. All because he internalized and accepted his unwantedness, languished too long in mealymouthed consolations, let himself be deceived into pitying those who would never pity him. Nothing can be done.
He’s never wanted to consider it, but with his hard-won lived experience and the stark authority of his disprivilege, he can declare that women, in aggregate, are just—wrong. That either they have failed feminism, or feminism has failed them. Yes, it’s complicated; and no, no woman in particular is to blame; but it’s irrefutable that in general, a preponderance of women harbor the very sorts of double standards feminism sought to eliminate, and indulge a narcissistic victim complex by which they tolerate and even seek out aggro misogyny in their romantic partners, while relying on men of conscience to handle the emotional scutwork. In his newfound communities of narrow-shouldered men he finds lived experiences that align near unanimously with his, in the comments of blogs like The Empirical Agnate and Rationally Rude, on forums like Seneca’s Revenge and NSOM (Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds), where he finds provocative opinions of undeniable salience, heroically uncowed by any anticipated backlash. At last, he’s found men willing to declare unapologetically that narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most oppressed subaltern group, excluded from both male privilege and female solidarity, a marginalization far worse than those based in race or gender, which were mere constructs, as opposed to the material fact of narrow shoulders. He can trust these other men in a way he cannot trust anyone else, as they are the only people on earth to take seriously his suffering and recognize that he isn’t to blame for it. While he disagrees with many of their heterodox positions on jaw morphology and age of consent, it is precisely the plurality of perspectives here that confirms the problem isn’t his alone: it is systemic.
Now that he is mostly confined to his bed, in one late-night tour of the NSOM forums, which he moderates, he’s busy drawing red circles around the telltale shoulder pad divots in photos of male celebrities, when he notices one thread attracting dozens of replies. Some normie interloper has been trolling the NSOM boards with inflammatory posts. This has happened before, but never at such length:
coldshoulder02
Unregistered User
Location: BC
Age: 23
Posts: 1
Rep Power: 0
just found this board and I’m fucking obsessed yall. not even just by the misogyny or the term-paper talk yall use to hide it. no, what’s mesmerizing is, no lie, I’m *one of you*. I’m 23 and a virgin, never had a gf or even a date, mostly solo queue League and work at Staples. I stumbled across this place because I have real NS, hell I’m built like a closed umbrella, and I always wondered if other guys felt insecure about it too. I work out sometimes but I’m not crazy fit or anything and wish I were bigger. I think racist/sexist jokes are funny but I feel bad about it. so, probably like you.
then I come here and WOW. what happened, boys? I can’t lie and say it isn’t nice to find other NS guys, but this place is like staring into a cursed mirror where the longer you stare at it the uglier you get, but it’s so fascinating you keep staring. go head and call me white knight/betafag/lib or whatever weak shit you got called in gym class in sixth grade. I’d rather die a sane virgin than fall for this mess.
idk maybe it’s more about what happened to me. maybe it’s bc I figured out some meds that work for me, or bc I have women in my life (grew up with four sisters). I’m not saying I’m better than any of yall, if I did I’d be the same as yall. so women either reject you or they don’t act 100% the way you want them to (the term for that is “slavery”). bottom line is nobody’s hurting or stealing anything from you. yall just hitched your psychosexual angst to your self-worth and it’s women’s fault somehow. however unfair you think it is, you’re MAKING IT WORSE. hope yall logoff and find peace.
He scrolls down through the ensuing dogpile, watches see hawk1488 post memes of skinny guys labeled betafag OP lifting two-pound weights, reads michaelJ_fux’s post femoid psy op piss off. By the end of the thread, his scalp is sodden and prickling. He feels that same flushed, hangdog supervisibility, that cleansing shame he used to feel when being scolded by his QPOC friend or reading feminist literature that diagnosed his unseen advantages and corrected his gaffes. He remembers thinking: if a stranger can so accurately describe what I’ve thought without even knowing me, they must be right, and I should listen to them. Now he wants to do likewise for this online stranger, whose familiar and bracing conviction, uncompromised by experience, floods him with nostalgia. It’s painful seeing this poor sap misled, as he himself was, like a sprinting dog about to hit the limit of its leash. The other users taunt the newcomer because it hurts less than admitting familiarity. Even if it’s too late for himself, he feels a responsibility to awaken this younger man to reality.
You may think you understand us, he posts, but I’ve been you far longer than you have. I want to tell you about the reality of having lived four decades of silent virtuous pain and never having your humanity and desirability recognized, he posts. It’s not that I haven’t done the intellectual labor to empathize with the broadest possible spectrum of female perspectives, I’ve read Sanger and Friedan and MacKinnon and Dworkin and Firestone and Faludi and Winterson and Butler and Solanas and Schulman and hooks and Greer. I understand them, and they perhaps understand the viewpoint of the patriarchy and its beneficiaries—but what have any of them read to understand us? Where in the archive do we even exist? My entire life I’ve been nothing but useful to women, selfless to the point that when I die my entire being will evaporate without residue, with no one left to know what I’ve had to endure absolutely by myself. Think of all the times you’ve been ill, with no one to bring you soup. Those nights you wake in the dark full of fear with no one to talk to. Every unshared bed. Every expired condom. Those couples you see everywhere, laughing and going home and fucking in every conceivable position: it will never be you. It will never be you. This is why you are wrong that they haven’t stolen anything from us: They’ve stolen our lives, our happiness. Our future and the people in it. You will never have a woman, and you will never have a son. Women’s fucked-up preferences may have been ingrained there by the patriarchy, but women, as moral agents fully equal to men, are no less responsible for them, and I will not infantilize them by claiming otherwise. Me, I’ve done more than my part: I’ve actively combated misogyny both in the world and within myself, tithed monthly to Planned Parenthood, marched and canvassed and fundraised and posted for women’s rights. I’m commitment-friendly, prosperous, successful, not ugly, in fact a solid eight from the neck up and nipples down, six-inch penis from base of shaft, high sperm count and seminal motility, +7° canthal tilt and 14.6 inch biacromial breadth, veritably a straight flush of stable-pair-bonding qualities, AND I have never ONCE catcalled, gaslit, interrupted, or mansplained, taking every single rejection in stride without any social support, no shared costs, inside jokes, pet names, intimate confessions, indeed any fond romantic memories whatsoever, none of the bliss of puppy love unspoiled by bitterness, the naïve love that knows no betrayal, nor trusting companionship that weathers hate and temptation, nobody waking up nestled in your elbow, no one to try new restaurants or take selfies or travel with, to say nothing of the conveniences, stability, and tax breaks enjoyed by the conjugal, on top of enduring the only real stigma that exists anymore, the only one that makes you less dignified for being honest about it: BACHELORHOOD, he posts. I’ve never complained, objected, or harassed anyone all these years no matter how cruel or senseless the rejection, if anything I enabled their rejections, and even took it as my duty. Which is all the more insidious, actually, that they convinced us to normalize and accept this, become complicit in our own oppression by pretending it’s not happening or doesn’t matter, or even if it is happening and does matter, you deserve it: that’s right, THEY are gaslighting YOU, all to absolve themselves of guilt, at the meager cost of our lives. We are made to eternally repent for the sins of the worst men, while those very same men reap the benefits of our care and counsel. And we are not even humored to speak on the matter. For they have built a cunning trap, a rhetorical kill switch, where if you try to speak up for them, they say Stay in your lane!, and if you say nothing, they say Silence is violence! Indicted from birth, lashed forever to the rack of apology, never forgiven much less rewarded, regardless of action or intent—do you see how they have made our existence impossible? This, after all we’ve sacrificed for them; I would have died for them if they’d asked, I would have thrown my bleeding body on the barricades of the patriarchy, and they would have let me do it, indifferently accepting my death as their due, with not a punctum of guilt as they go off to bed and wed my murderers. That is the long con, their big lie. By now my bachelorhood, and yours, cannot be ascribed to circumstance or bad luck, only injustice. We must reject it. Like my many, many female friends themselves always used to say, nothing’s wrong with me, any woman would have been lucky to have me, I’ve only asked for the same modest redamancy that everyone else—including chauvinists, liars, addicts, narcissists, abusers, rapists, and low-IQ men—enjoys everywhere. I’d be the last to demand any special treatment for my actual, unselfish, principled feminism, and to be sure, no specific woman is required to be attracted to us . . . but the fact that not one has been, out of billions, is proof of a categorical failure, a mass abrogation of the social contract by the legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets, he posts. I have always, always been there for women. When have they ever been there for us? How, after decades of relentless refusal, can they ever repair this silent androcide, the calamity of our aborted futures?
He receives no reply. The stranger probably didn’t even see his post. Examining what he’d written, scouring it with an unsparing eye toward logic and tone, he finds no error. He closes his laptop, surveys his dimmed room: humidifier, prescription bottles, weights he can no longer lift, bedside wastebasket full of tissues wadded with phlegm and cum. With his mouth in a grim hyphen, he inspects his penis, which is not only flaccid and cadaverously livid from overpumping but has developed some sort of irritating sun rash that isn’t sun rash, ever since he resorted to masturbating with a textured plumber’s glove in order to feel anything at all. This can’t happen again: all this not-happening. The nothing that is made of words, the reading and processing and discussing and journaling and posting with which he’d attempted to understand the hundreds of women’s voices he’d then gone on to uplift and amplify, only to hear that those voices were mocking him, all the listening—wasted effort constituting a wasted life. Words by themselves have no substance, he realizes, they are only ever meant to underscore acts. Being correct has been its own reward and no reward at all. Now with whatever miserable span of life remains to him he must commit himself to action, pull out the serrated knife of virtue that’s been stuck in his chest for so long he thought it was a part of him. Before he dies he must stop nothing from happening.
Weeks later, after some false starts, he is standing in the vestibule of his former favorite restaurant when a woman enters behind him, a short young twentysomething in a yellow smock with little pin-tucked ruffles, her collarbones lightly pied by sunburn. He stands aside to hold the door for her, and she thanks him. In spite of his resolve, he smiles back and nods courteously at this small final vindication, before pulling on his ski mask, shrugging the backpack from his narrow shoulders, and following her in.
Pics
Love is mutual: which means Alison’s never been in love. Her high school boyfriend of three years had turned out to be gay, and she’d made him admit, after much needling, that he’d never been attracted to her. In college she’d dated a more popular guy who turned their shared friend group against her in the breakup, leaving her with a distrust of both lovers and friends, not to mention herself. Nothing but isolated hookups since, though she gets hit on in the usual degrading ways: being commanded on the street by random men to smile, getting called a bitch when she doesn’t. Her dating app inboxes crammed with free-floating dicks. She used to believe the reason she was so prone to this kind of bad attention was because she herself was somehow innately “bad”; later she realized that not only was it the men who were bad, but that the crux of their badness was their ability to convince her she was bad. Though that doesn’t mean she isn’t bad, she sometimes thinks.
Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.
One night in her late twenties, Alison visits her best friend Neil’s house. Neil is slender, bookish, objectively interesting: he builds his own furniture from reclaimed wood and works for a nonprofit that rehabilitates pedophiles undergoing voluntary chemical castration. He supports his parents financially, and his tiny apartment contains hanging plants, a half-bedroom with a piano in it that he illegally Airbnbs for extra income, and antique farming tools adorning the walls. They are meeting for their monthly ritual: he makes her favorite panko-crusted baked mac and cheese with Crystal hot sauce, and she cuts his hair while they stream reality TV. They’d started this ritual back in college, when he was helping her recover from the worst period of her eating disorder by finding and making the one food that she wasn’t revulsed by, and waiting with her after eating it; Neil was the only person who didn’t regard her with either concealed disgust or corny delicacy, who made recovery feel meaningful and worthwhile.
They’re watching Hoarders on his laptop perched on a stool, and she’s already seen this episode, so Alison spends most of the time watching him squirm and gasp at the most horrible parts; she’s always enjoyed reliving things vicariously more than experiencing them directly. The video stream starts to buffer. “Shit, goddamnit, sorry, this never happens when I’m watching by myself,” Neil says. “I have to log in again or something. Damnit!” Alison says he’s acting like he has erectile dysfunction, and he says, “You’re the one with the ED, not me.” She laughs—he’s the only one who could get away with that joke—and he mutters, “Yeah, I’ve got no problems in that department.”
This comment, the weird oomph he puts on it, tickles at her brain. As the show continues to buffer, Neil leans forward to adjust the angle of the laptop screen as if that’ll fix it, and when he leans back he rests his hand on Alison’s knee, but in a weird crab shape where only the fingertips are touching. It stays there for a full ten seconds until he leans forward again to tap the space bar, makes some inquiring eye contact, and they lunge at each other.
Physically he’s not her type at all, and she’s never thought he was hot, until now, the moment she realizes he thinks she’s hot. The kissing is pretty good, much enhanced by the spontaneity and wrong-hotness of tongue-kissing a close friend. They both awkwardly laugh more than she’d prefer, and he spends way too long sucking her nipples, to the point where she consciously thinks the word latching. But then the mood shifts—she is no longer Mommy, he is Daddy, and he lifts and tosses her around with a thrilling lack of effort, and, as she’s long suspected based on the size of his ears and nose, he has an era-definingly huge dick, curved in the way only really huge ones are, like they have inches to spare and can take the long way around. She cums so hard it makes her sit up.
