Man

Man, I’m glad the comments in the last post are over. Brief, but it made me feel like shit. The first bad blood to happen on this site. I hate actual conflict.

I’ve known a couple of wife beaters in my life. I’m not saying the guy from that post is, but that’s just the direction I’m going. One was a friend of mine who I lived with in Brooklyn and Northampton, Mass. There was a rumor that he had date-raped a girl in college but was falsely accused. I took his side but I wasn’t sure. In Northampton, I fell asleep--probably drunk, I don’t remember--on the couch with his girlfriend. We weren’t anywhere near each other on the couch, but he took this as his opportunity to hit her and break things in the house. I tried to stop it but it was a fucking mess that lasted the entire night. The man’s eyes had gone from blue to black. A real demonic kind of sociopath. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard he had killed somebody.

Our friendship was fine in the beginning, nice even. We were all writers living in a broken-down Boerum Hill house. It was the house where I wrote my novel Oscar Caliber Gun in a spastic month. He was very charismatic, women loved him, which probably fits the profile. The second guy I knew was my sister-in-law’s husband. Also a manly little-boy demon, charming to everyone else, but possessed by something deeply bad. They’ve since divorced.

This is depressing, why am I writing about this? The last comments got me thinking. I used to be a misogynist myself--not a wife-beater, please, just not all that in favor of women. It’s a really complicated experience to be sexually attracted to someone you don’t like personally. This is the experience of a lot of hard-up guys in their twenties.

Now, I’m the opposite. I once aspired to a Hemingway-esque masculine ideal. I find real men’s lack of emotional awareness sort of brain-damaged. Male aggression is infantile. I used to think bookish intelligence was all that mattered. I’m not saying that women can’t be bookishly intelligent, just that men are more competitive about making it known--like an intellectual bar fight. Women are more interesting to me. Intuition is more interesting to me. There are plenty of awful women out there, just as there are plenty of awful men. But men have been a whole lot worse to this planet than women.