I’ve always been a “guy’s girl,” and never a “girly girl”. I’m a feminist, but I have a really hard time respecting women as a group. As a group, I find women can be catty, needy, manipulative, and tend to undermine their intelligence and their strength far too often. There are exceptions to this rule (Michelle Obama, Audrey Hepburn, My Mother, My editor, etc.), but as a whole, I’m not a huge fan of “women.” The reason I’m telling you this is because I’ve always been this way. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve found the women of my family to be silly and somewhat frivolous. I never wanted to go play hopscotch or have my hair braided with my girl cousins – I wanted to go in the living room and yell at the football game with my uncles.
Men, as a group, have always been logical, rational, pragmatic, and relatable to me. I love men. I love everything about them. The way they can be so aloof, the way they can be emotionless, the way people lean on them, the way the handle themselves. Nothing is sexier to me than Gregory Peck, Brando, Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Hunter S. Thompson, and James Dean. Men that were real men, I just … I could get drunk off the subtle mannerisms and movements of men. But recently, that’s all changed.
I’m really disappointed in men, and angry. I think I’m really angry. I’ve done the leg work on this … I’m not just making a blanketed statement because I’m mad at my boyfriend or because some guy was rude to me. Men are disappointments. They’re lacking. They’re simple. They’re selfish. They’re predictable. They’re all the same. These are the facts of my interactions with men. I’m not blaming men for this; in fact, I think I’m mostly to blame for this. I have really low expectations of men and when they meet those expectations I become disappointed. But who’s to say I didn’t set them up to fail myself?
I was telling a “friend” that I thought I had made a mistake pitching this article. I told him that I didn’t want to write it because when I started to write it I was forced to deal with the real reasons I feel this way. He asked what those were and I dodged the answer and somehow got him to tell me what he thought the answer could be. This is his take on why, lately, I have issues with men, “You are not surrounding yourself with people that help you feel better about the things you dislike about yourself and appreciate the things you do like about yourself. I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for in a man, but you’re not finding it, so you’re disappointed.” That’s one way to look at this. It’s probably an accurate way to look at this. When I think about what caused this new dislike of the male creature, it stems back to a horrible cliché moment in my life and I can’t believe I’m going to put this in writing and allow it to go on the Internet.
This anger and disappointment was born from the fact that I thought I had found the one guy, outside of my Dad, who is probably the most perfect male on the planet, who was going to be different—and he wasn’t. There’s the truth in black and white type.
When I was ten, my biological father broke my heart when he turned out to be a bad guy. At ten years old I had decided that men were not to be trusted, that they were princes when they wanted to be, but mostly were weak, evil, monsters out for themselves. When …
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