Manspology

danharmon:

I don’t know what you text to a girlfriend this morning and I sure don’t want to find out through trial and error. Last night, she never came over because an hour into the election, at the sight of the first numbers, she stopped knowing how to interact with the world and couldn’t get out of bed. I share that deeply private fact without fear of embarrassing her, not because embarrassing women was legalized in last night’s referendum, but because she’s numb. If I texted her for permission to share her numbness, I’d get the same response as if I asked her to eat a submarine. “Okay,” she’d reply. “I’m going to try to sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I had no part in doing this to her, right? My state is blue, we legalized weed and protected Riley Reid’s workplace last night, and between being called an MRA, a douche and a pig by folks that remember me comparing Season 4 of Community to rape, I’m more often these days called an SJW cuck, which I like, because it sounds like someone younger than me. I want to be relevant and woke and lit and Pokémon to the max. Which is why I quietly rooted for Bernie but saw the Democratic primaries as being too sensitive to benefit from my loud mouth, and when Bernie conceded, I quietly switched to the only candidate that wasn’t anti-vaccination, anti-immigration or that Gary guy. I played my part in this whole thing just fine from beginning to end. So I’m off the hook with my shell shocked girlfriend, right?

No, because I played my part begrudgingly. And if I had known these results were possible, I wouldn’t have put an adverb on my playing of it. Except maybe “humbly” or “apologetically” or “extra cuckily” Because, at the risk of riling up anyone that will only see the political aspect of this personal confession: I know this wasn’t about emails.

If you feel it was, nothing bad is going to happen to you if you walk away from this post. I can assure you, I’m not challenging or invalidating the results of an election you see as a win. Fair play and all that. I’m glad we didn’t have a civil war.

But I want to leave a message here to my numb girlfriend that can’t work as tweets or texts or my trademark pillow talk babbling. And I guess there’s a few ex-lovers and coworkers that I hope read this too. Women that have reason not to believe I’m on their side.

The message starts with the obvious, I’m sorry. But what I’ve learned in my cuck SJW workshops is that saying “I’m sorry” isn’t an apology. A full apology is an acknowledgment of the offense, an expression of remorse and a commitment to change.

The remorse, that’s easy. I feel bad she lost and that I assumed she’d win and therefore was a dick about it. I’m all remorse this morning, I’d cut a pinky off if it let my girlfriend face the world today, smiling the way she was the last time I saw her. I don’t know if I’d be capable of actually doing the pinky cutting, I think that’s something a full on Trump guy would be better at, and if it were possible, I would like to be knocked out or at least anesthetized for the removal, because I’m a cuckity cuckimus maximus beta mega cucksuck. But I’d donate the finger and more to make this unhappen. Remorse expressed.

Acknowledgment of the crime is the one that’s going hurt and upset people because it’s confession to a crime that is life long and confusing and that won’t stop just because I confessed it.

I acknowledge that until this election, I have always felt, on some level, that although women weren’t getting a fair shake, it probably “kind of evened out” in other ways. No I can’t tell you what that means in detail because I’ve never actually consciously parsed the thought, and that’s the crime, I’ve just walked around with it. “It’s clearly harder to be a woman in this society,” I’d think, “but it’s probably easier in other ways. And in any case, one thing we know for sure…it’s different.” I do a podcast every week in which I’m constantly running my mouth about race and gender but my goal in doing so, I see now, has always been less to investigate, grow or connect and more to figure out how to make people like me (yes that last 43 years was me trying to make you like me, yes I know how sad and funny that is). I’ve kept one eye on the ever morphing fashion of gender discourse and the other eye on my own survival as a primate and figured I was, underneath it all, a feminist because my thoughts about women were never “they suck” or “they’re dumb” or “I want to hurt them.”

Now I see the crime starts so much earlier in the thought process than that. In figuring out how to survive as a frightened man, I’ve built every thought about people on a foundational assumption that the sexually reproductive dichotomy we inherited from life as old as plants was a more important dichotomy, regardless of context, than any other difference between two humans you could name.

And hey, sometimes that emphasis on sexual dichotomy is fun, or benign, or even progressive feeling, like when two men of two different complexions are so busy bonding about how women be shopping that they’re accidentally something other than racist for a second.

And then last night this thing happened. This thing that we know was not about emails. And not about the tangled roots of semi-documented corruption and not about revoked promises of walls or recanted suspicions about birthplaces, or anything you could name outside of that one thing that has us more divided than all our divisive specialities put together. This thing that has had us all so divided since before this country was a glint in its explorers’ eyes, that last night, with no ways left to express the division subtly, we walked up to the concept of our first lady president, gave it some thought, and walked away having opted for the first President to call Mexicans rapists in the same year he was charged with raping a 13 year old girl.

And I really hope you’re not still reading this if it’s making you want to argue with me. I don’t want to argue. There is no debate here to be had and we can all agree debates have stopped mattering because we also just elected the first President to blame flaming out in a debate on the moderator’s menstruation.

There I go to my comfort zone. Anger, babbling, competition, show everybody what a dramatic underdog hero you are. That’s the part of me represented by this election, that’s the part of me that got our first David Duke endorsed President into an office where he has access to the camera in your laptop and that’s the part of me I want to apologize for, which means to express remorse for, acknowledge the existence of, and finally, most importantly, to commit to changing.

I’m never going to secretly suspect anyone of exaggerating again when they tell me they don’t feel supported, or that they feel attacked. I’m going to take everything people tell me about the challenges facing them at face value and make it my goal to help them get their elusive fair shake however they can. And I’m going to take that part of my thought process that recognizes another human’s gender or race, and rather than nobly ignoring it or hilariously calling it out, I’m going to remove it from the foundation of my thoughts and just put it over to the side, where it’s as significant as someone’s horoscope and says as much about their needs as their height or weight or number of limbs, which is to say, sometimes a lot, sometimes not at all, but never by default. I am going to stop trying to find meaning in chaos by categorizing people, no matter how optimistic or supportive those categories might seem. They’ll never be fair and they’ll never lead to me doing right by anyone.

I’m not going to achieve this new thinking by typing it, I’m going to change it the way my therapist says change works: by behaving and speaking like a person that already lives in that world and letting my neurology gradually adapt. By slowing my thoughts down at the top of judgments and practicing the observation of my own brain in even the most common moments. By disrupting my mental routines even when I don’t perceive them as existing, in every encounter I have with every human being, even while I’m just laying in bed alone, running simulations of others. I’m going to stop expecting things like fairness and respect from the world and start seeing what happens when I become the source of those things. I’m going to stop making it my business to punish and reward others and defending myself. I’m going to try to figure out what the people that enter my life need in the moment of their entrance and make unique real time decisions about my relationship with them. No, I’m not going to be nicer to anyone on Twitter. Twitter is a fucking toilet. Don’t meet people in a toilet if you want to have a healthy encounter. I go there to shit on the planet and make jokes.

And if it takes me until the moment before I randomly die, I’m going to focus on making the space around me an effective advertisement for a decent world. Without expecting the world to buy into it. I don’t control the world. I don’t control other people. I control whether or not I surrender. I control when my walls come down, when the bullshit stops and whatever’s behind the walls joins whoever’s near me.

Whatever this is isn’t going to get better by getting longer. It also stopped behind honest in the last paragraph because my girlfriend came over and is now sitting next to me and I’m not interacting with her because I’m trying to finish this. I don’t know how to finish writing things. And I don’t know what people need or what they’ve been through or what hurts them and when it’s me. Cody, I’m sorry about last night, about the thing with the guy with the hair and the stuff. I acknowledge my role in it, I feel bad about it and I’m going to change the only part of it I can change. I love you. You deserve better.

Everybody reading this deserves better. Maybe this is how we end up getting it.

Or maybe this is how the statue of liberty ends up buried on a beach up to its armpits in Planet of the Apes. I always wondered what the hell could make that happen.