Dear Chris and Anand and Teddy and Dan,
It is with boundless sorrow that I am forced to sever our friendships. This will be a great shock and a deep wound for all of us, I am sure, but the fault is primarily yours. I would never have chosen this, considering our decades of close and affectionate interactions, the way I rely on you for emotional support and unconditional love, the easy hours we spend talking and joking around. For most of the years of my life now, I thought you were strung into my life loom, that you were warp and weft of the rough cloth time weaves and I gather to me. I was wrong, wrong for so long. New information upends everything I thought I knew; my life is in upheaval. I must shut you and all your kind out of my life to live with my new truth.
‘What?’, I hear you ask, your hurt creeping into your beloved voices. “What could we have done to cause this?” It isn’t ‘what’ you should be asking, but ‘why’. Why were you born men? Why, good people who would otherwise be the bedrock of my life? Why where you born into the gender I now despise?
I understand that until this moment I had given no evidence that I despised you for your masculinity. For all those years, I was pretending, to you, but most of all to me. I thought that I loved kicking it with my guys. We go outside and play catch. We sit on porches, drink and play backgammon. We go CD shopping and get a burger on the way home. We studied together and still talk for ages. We have lived in each others’ houses. I have fed you vast amounts of food. I used to think that was great. There were times when your deep and loud laughter filled my house and reverberated off the walls and I was giddy with delight in your presence.
But that was before. Today I have been informed that I despise your gender. Like a shock of light through murky clouds, I see the inevitable truth of this! I am woman; I must hate men! All of them! Including those I have long loved very much.
I go to start on my new, man-less life. I’m sure you understand that I cannot linger over this letter; I have so much to do. I must also disown my own father, my living embodiment of the Patriarchy. Must I discard the perfect nephews? Surely not; they are babies, boys. I can love them as long as they are boys, can’t I? If that measure is allowed me, my brother will stay a baby forever, so that I can continue to love his gangly self. There is much else to do. As you well know, my former friends, I am plagued by desire for the shapes of men. Double burden now, that I must hate what I also crave. A new struggle for me, and me with half the friends who always shared my struggles.
Again, I go. I cannot wish you well, for you are men. Such a shame that you ruined everything. I can’t miss a man, of course, but I will miss what we could have had, the rest of the lifelong friendship we could have shared, had you only been a woman. Such a loss. Why did you do it?
‘What?’, I hear you ask, your hurt creeping into your beloved voices. “What could we have done to cause this?” It isn’t ‘what’ you should be asking, but ‘why’. Why were you born men? Why, good people who would otherwise be the bedrock of my life? Why where you born into the gender I now despise?
I understand that until this moment I had given no evidence that I despised you for your masculinity. For all those years, I was pretending, to you, but most of all to me. I thought that I loved kicking it with my guys. We go outside and play catch. We sit on porches, drink and play backgammon. We go CD shopping and get a burger on the way home. We studied together and still talk for ages. We have lived in each others’ houses. I have fed you vast amounts of food. I used to think that was great. There were times when your deep and loud laughter filled my house and reverberated off the walls and I was giddy with delight in your presence.
But that was before. Today I have been informed that I despise your gender. Like a shock of light through murky clouds, I see the inevitable truth of this! I am woman; I must hate men! All of them! Including those I have long loved very much.
I go to start on my new, man-less life. I’m sure you understand that I cannot linger over this letter; I have so much to do. I must also disown my own father, my living embodiment of the Patriarchy. Must I discard the perfect nephews? Surely not; they are babies, boys. I can love them as long as they are boys, can’t I? If that measure is allowed me, my brother will stay a baby forever, so that I can continue to love his gangly self. There is much else to do. As you well know, my former friends, I am plagued by desire for the shapes of men. Double burden now, that I must hate what I also crave. A new struggle for me, and me with half the friends who always shared my struggles.
Again, I go. I cannot wish you well, for you are men. Such a shame that you ruined everything. I can’t miss a man, of course, but I will miss what we could have had, the rest of the lifelong friendship we could have shared, had you only been a woman. Such a loss. Why did you do it?
posted by Megan at 3:10 PM
17 Comments:
Shorter you: "Some of my best friends are male."
Please. You can do better than that. I blame the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Another good one is "I can't be a man hating feminist because I'm married/have a boyfriend". Which of course explains Gloria Steinam, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer, all of whom were married at one point or another. The man love emanating from the aformentioned feminists is of course palpable.
Shorter you: "Some of my best friends are male."
No longer.
I must have missed a really juicy comment somewhere or other.
Just so you know: since I'm imaginary, I don't actually HAVE a sex.
Of course, I can't be your friend, either, except your imaginary friend, but at least you don't have to despise me.
Oh, and if I recall correctly you are of Korean heritage, which I am genuinely cool with except for the fact that you hate white people because you think we are racist.
Which of course means you'll have to ditch your white friends. And straight friends too. They're hateful homophobes.
But this is marvelous! Anand just wrote me to remind me that I've been teasing him for his lesbian ways for years (the extensive collection of woman singer-songwriters, the unusually good taste in eyeglass rims, the preference for women, the sandals). Anand reminds me that he a a lesbian of color! We are reunited! I missed him so much.
I bet he'll post about it soon.
HA HA HA HA HA HA
I am so glad that I caught the comment that prompted this 'cuz it makes this post sooooooooooo much funnier.
Even though I'm male in a, you know, anatomical sense, it's probably okay for me to comment here because I can't stand football and therefore according to our culture I'm not a real man.
From the two most recent posts I infer that someone has accused you, Megan, of hating men. This seems like a rather overlong response to such a dumb and banal accusation. Perhaps if I knew the precise manner in which the accusation was leveled, I would understand why these posts are funny.
For context, Megan wrote a post expressing shock and a wide range of other feelings at "discovering" (joke quotes necessary) that men are significantly stronger than women. The post was picked up by a popular Canadian blog run by a woman you people would consider a redneck, notwithstanding her Mensa membership.
I conveyed to Megan my criticism of her comment policy as her post was so disrespectful to the male gender - not to mention spectacularly unaware in general - to not concede the most basic and stunningly obvious of truths about them. I also offered that "from conflict comes growth" and that deleting non-shiny happy comments may be a suboptimal comment policy.
I then further suggested that she hates men, white people and straight people. Why? Unless you are willfully ignorant you'll note that white straight males are under attack in the media in your country and mine, an accusation to which you will no doubt reply with a long post making fun of the accusation.
Grown women *with engineering degrees* do not believe that men and women are of equal strength unless something is seriously wrong with their brain; my hypothesis, and I'm not exactly reaching here, is that our friend Megan is, like tens of millions of us, brainwashed all to hell by hideously stupid political correctness, and there is no shiny happy way to say that, nor should there be a need to.
Generations of white guys have done stuff to make your life less of a hassle, Megan, and you repay them - us - by not even granting them the most basic of respect? I've had enough and I suspect tens of millions of other white guys have had enough too.
Write a post expressing how unfair affirmative action is to your white friends and male friends and how we need to drop political correctness and I'll gladly admit I am wrong. The onus is now on you to prove you are not a hater and part of the affirmative action scam.
Thanks, guy at 3:01. Now I understand why Megan's posts are funny. In semi-deference to Megan's comment policy, I'll say nothing else about your views.
That was a great description of the context and your position. Nicely done.
Couple things:
The explanation for why I didn't realize that men were that much stronger is in paragraph four of that post. It puzzled me, too, that I hadn't known the difference is as big as it is.
The other thing is that you've put together a story, based on things you've encountered and explanations you've read and the way brains like to associate facts into reasons. Then you came here and said things that are about your story. I have no obligation to disprove or even address your story.
I sortof enjoyed the conceit that I despise men, so I went with it for an afternoon. One of my favorite techniques is to adopt and exaggerate postures that people assume about me. Fun. But even that confused the people who read here often. That's not good blogging on my part.
You and your assumptions are welcome here, especially because you laid them out so clearly, so we can follow your thought. I'll keep deleting comments that don't follow the comment policy, and I am even more rigorous about enforcing that between commenters. But clear and engaged comments like the one above are fine.
(I'd prefer if the very signature didn't assign characteristics to me, but perhaps that will come later.)
I scanned your comment for hate and it came out negligible so I shall take you up on your offer to leave nonhostile comments in the future.
To explain my reaction to your post further, here is what I said at SDA :
This past winter I'm eating breakfast one morning after a heavy snowfall when I hear my neighbour's wheels spinning in his driveway. I put on my jacket and boots and do what Vimy Ridge Canadians do.
I get there and it's my neighbour behind the wheel and his girlfriend standing there (tight driveway, his car). "But I already tried that!" she says as I go to push him out. Actually I "bounce" him out, using leverage, as I learned from my male elders. Strength may not have been an issue.
Anyway, she offers a "You're so strong!", as if she's embarrassed that a guy is stronger than her. I wave to buddy, he waves to me, I go back to breakfast.
It's true; the average young Canadian woman is so brainwashed to believe boys = girls that even though they are bombarded with evidence daily of male physical superiority their cognitive dissonance won't allow them to believe that men are stronger than women.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=7160
I'd add that a lot of people came to your defence and said you were joking, for what that's worth. I have to go back to work now.
Well, I do always like non-hostile comments.
This is all such fun.
- An Anonymous Reader With Nothing Personal At Stake In This Sorta-Argument, Except Of Course The Possibility That I Too Might Be A Man-Hater And So Shouldn't Think This Is Fun and Slightly Comical, But Rather Serious, Serious Business. Like Water Policy.
I'm glad I finally found out what this was about, as I was wondering.
And "the gender [Megan] despises" seems to have got it all wrong, because he was taking one post out of context, rather than the blog as a whole.
Though I will admit getting annoyed at times at SOME women not realizing how weak they are.
"No, do not lift up on one corner of the sofa as I am carrying it. You will only serve to unbalance it!"
I'm sure I annoy them with my complete inability to do something. Understand why some clothes go together and others don't perhaps? Or even my inability to realize what it is that I cannot do.
"Understand why some clothes go together and others don't perhaps?"
Wow. Nice jump from real, physical differences to completely social ones, based on cultural assumptions. Unless there's some physiological reason that women are more inclined to be into clothes and fashion that I just don't know about.
I was struggling to come up with something physical and innate, but I couldn't.
And yes, I know that IN THEORY, women have better endurance over really long term stuff.
But in practice, you never encounter this outside of extreme sporting groups. (In practice, any halfway athletic woman can outrun me over any distance at all, but so will all the men, I just suck at running.)
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