I Hate Men by Pauline Harmange

Author:Pauline Harmange [Harmange, Pauline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-30T17:00:00+00:00

Mediocre as a white dude

Once I’d gauged the extent of my anger towards men, I felt rather helpless. What to do about all those mediocre men I saw all around me? Didn’t throwing them into the (non-recycling) bin risk creating a void in my life that would be impossible to fill? Was there any solution other than to go and live in an abandoned shack somewhere deep in a forest?

Here’s the scoop, though: humanity isn’t made up of only men. It’s difficult to believe, given how much room they take up and the way they’ve managed to make everyone believe they’re completely indispensable. But don’t panic: once we’ve given men the push, we’ll realise there’s a load of awesome women (starting with ourselves, obviously) that the noisy and damaging ubiquity of men has kept us from noticing and appreciating.

It’s amazing how we manage to forget about ourselves, simply because every day we’re overwhelmed by the sheer extent of male self-aggrandisement. This isn’t to say that all men are necessarily malign, but it’s hard to fight the idea that’s imprinted on our psyches very early on in our lives that men’s opinions, even those given in passing on the street, are more valuable than ours. Even those of us in relationships we think of as egalitarian still police our way of being, how we present ourselves to the world, to please the men in our lives. We buy clothes that are flattering but uncomfortable because we want our partner to think we’re still attractive. We swallow our irritation when he forgets to put the milk back in the fridge again, even though we’ve reminded him fifteen times – after all we’re not their mothers[fn1] – because it’s exhausting to be constantly complaining about trivial things. We bite our tongues in conversation so as not to contradict him and make him feel uncomfortable, or because we lack confidence in our own opinions. We grudgingly agree to sexual practices that make us feel uncomfortable, because we know we’re supposed to spice up the relationship; or alternatively we keep quiet about our own desires, bury our fantasies, so as not to shatter the respectable image that women are supposed to project.

We cannot truly be ourselves when our internal cursor is governed not by what our heads and our hearts tell us, but by the arbitrary opinion not of one man but of a whole crowd of men who come and go throughout our lives.

For a while now my guiding wisdom in life has been Canadian writer Sarah Hagi’s Daily Prayer to Combat Impostor Syndrome: ‘God give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude’. Whenever I’m beset by doubt, I think about all the mediocre men[fn2] who’ve managed to make their mediocrity pass for competence, by that magical sleight of hand called arrogance. The audacity of this ploy – the antithesis of imposter syndrome – is entirely the preserve of men. It’s enraging how we’re constantly terrorised at the thought of putting forward arguments

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