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For the longest time, I considered myself a feminist. Perhaps even the best male feminist. Not because I in any way actively supported feminist causes or did anything that could have helped the movement, but simply because I was so much cooler than all the effete dude losers who publicly identified as feminists and made women’s rights their top priority.
“I’m a male feminist, grrjiggers, and I’m here to help.”
There’s a reason I didn’t do anything proactive, because, well, it was obvious to everyone (except, well, the women) that those chest-puffing, supporting your reproductive rights gents were only using that stance to score some sweet tang.
Not because they actually cared. But ladies have finally wizened up to that jig, and, as is such, women no longer want men to be feminists.
Which perfect, because none of us wanted to in the first place.
Except that the people we’re dealing with haven’t changed – nope, women are still as fickle and confounding as ever — which means despite the fact that they no longer want you supporting their causes, they can still hate you if you don’t support their causes.
So what’s a Bro to do?
You’ve gotta walk a fine line. You can’t trumpet policy points about equal pay on Facebook and talk about how proud you are of Marissa Mayer for designing her own maternity leave, but you also can’t torch literature about safe sex and hurl lead-lined Bibles at teenage girls who wear crop tops to school.
Consternated, you are.
It’s okay. This is why I’m doing this right now. Because I think I’ve found a solution where us dudes can still fart and deuce and generally be apathetic to the world at large, while still enabling all the things women want these days.
It’s called not being a feminist, and it’s easy as fuck to do. All you need is a few guiding principles.
Principle #1: Don’t throw Bibles at women for wearing sexually provocative clothing to high school
Even better, don’t even leave your couch. Don’t ever take an active stance on anything except there not being beer in the fridge. There should be more beer in the fridge, that’s for dang sure, but why’s it ever matter what a woman wears? Why would you have a care about that shit? You don’t even know the difference between heels and flats, even though both those words are actual descriptions of what the two shoes are.
Remember, no one ever hated on you when your slim fitting suit pants showed off a faint outline of your dick (in fact, you got high fives), so just don’t ever offer an opinion on what anyone else does. That’s all feminists really want. You not to speak your mind, which is fucking phenomenal. Tweeting is hard. Thinking is arduous. Having an informed opinion a practical impossibility. Just watch sports instead, and as long as you don’t call the cheerleaders “Daddy’s Team Sluts,” you are 90 percent of the way there.
Because all women want is the world to be only slightly better, and you can do your part by just doing nothing that actively makes it worse. And not offering your opinion on shit that’s irrelevant to you, because:
Principle 2: Women know better than men what’s right for women.
This is a simple analogy. Have you, ever, ever, ever gotten pissed at a woman for telling you you were too drunk and that it was time for you to stop?
Yea.
You know how much booze your damn body can control and it’s a fuck ton more than your complain’ ass wife thinks. Now replace the words “booze” with “safe access to any and all reproductive measures” and let women figure out what the fuck they want to do with all that. Just like you get to with your drinking.
“But I don’t feel comfortable with all these women having… sex… whenever they want and then killing those babies before they’re born and using the money from selling the dead babies to buy drugs so they can get high and have more sex.”
Well, impracticality of that hypothetical aside, it ain’t your fucking problem. Like it really isn’t.
And again, think about how you feel when someone takes away your booze.
Sad? Angry? Hurt? Like something that exists solely to make your life easier and better was unfairly stripped from you?
Starting to get it?
Principle 3: Don’t fuck your secretary in exchange for a promotion.
Look man, if your secretary wants to fuck you, you can fuck her. That’s cool, dude. The break room, in Accounts Payable, you two can leave your sex juices all over the damn conference room table for all I care. You could fuck your mom’s secretary if you want. You just can’t, if you are in a position of power, use your power to get sex from subordinates.
“Well what’s the point of being in power?” you preen. I don’t know. Money, prestige, sex with plenty of people who aren’t direct reports? Why are we even having this conversation. You don’t have a secretary, and you probably never will, but if you do, just use your dick for fucking (you love to do that) and not as a de facto HR department.
But like, “Hey!” You shout at… I guess your computer screen. “I thought this was going to be no work at all, and now you’re telling me I have to fight off the blue balls my hot secretary is giving me?”
I know. It’s hard. You can’t under your desk but over your pants rub your dick until you come into your boxers and forget you were ever horny.
But you’re right. We are going to have to shake a few behaviors, because, let’s be honest, the shit we have lazily ingrained within ourselves has not served us as well as you would think saying “Fuck it, I’ll do whatever I want” would shape a society.
Surprising, I know, and a great number of these bad things (you realize people are still big up on the genocide) are harmful to a great number of people on this planet.
And most of this shit we now instinctively believe was derived by people who, because they were the dominant sex for the longest time and wanted to keep it that way, lived by axioms like “the lady brain is too small to write legislation.”
Principle 4: Don’t believe the lady brain is too small for anything.
A lot of shit we currently think about women is flat out wrong. They can drive cars, and have done so successfully for many decades. They can menstruate in public spaces without any of us ever being cognizant of it or worse off for it. They can… really do anything men do. And as a newfound not-feminist, all you have to do is say “Yep,” and go back to your beverage of choice. (Bourbon, right? You’ve switched from beer to bourbon by now.)
It’s not bad to admit that we were wrong about a lot of shit. Stridently holding on to factually incorrect things is what holds society back, and holding society back is hard god damn work.
It’s far easier to remember that the people before us were beyond stupid instead of trying to defending their indefensible shit. Fuck, if we still endorsed policies of past generations, we’d continue to be nuclear bombing the dick out of the planet and chaining women to the stove until they made us a chicken pot pie.
Principle 5: Anyone can make a pot pie
And anyone who doesn’t want to make pot pie doesn’t have to make pot pie.
Word? That doesn’t change your life, right? The choice should be solely up to the individual, regardless of external pressure, such as rigid gender stereotypes. That’s what gave us the awful microwavable pot pie movement of the 1970s.
Which is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Shitty Stouffer’s is what happens when you prevent people from doing what they want or are good at. You wind up living in a world of bullshit microwaved pot pie with the shit dirt crumbly crust and icy chunks of chicken and an over-salted sauce that isn’t even a true bechamel.
Why did we bother with that dick fuck? So let’s all agree to not force anything upon anyone.
AND… Speaking of … (I’m stalling here because this is a doozy) not making someone do something they don’t want to, we should talk a bit about consent.
Christ, chill out. You already flipped.
I ain’t trying to turn you into a feminist. I don’t want you to travel to California and hold a sign that reads “ONLY YES MEANS YES” in front of a state legislature that you aren’t even sure is in session. Who the hell knows when Sacramento even shows up for work. Not me, that’s for sure.
I’m here to ask you a simple question.
When’s the last time you sucker punched your friend in the head.
Principle 6: Just treat women the same you would your dude friends
One surreptitiously sneaked in ejaculation under some forceful yet apologetic guise isn’t going to make or break your life (you have … what’s three times 365 times however long it is from now until you die? A lot of jizz?), but doing that in any form or fashion is completely wrong.
You really think it’s worth fucking up someone’s life simply to get the same damn sensation you’ve experienced twice since you started reading this article (you have been jacking off this whole time, I presume)?
Like, if you wanted to put your dick in your best guy friend, you would you ask beforehand?
Ask yourself, when’s the last time you asked someone in a bed if they were sure they wanted to do it? Probably never.
Look, to get earnest here ten billion pretend words in, one of the reasons sexual assault is so prevalent within our culture is that we don’t teach anyone that they should check to make sure it’s okay to fuck before they fuck. You weren’t told that, but it’s so much easier on your triceps to ask a simple question instead of hovering half naked over a woman and attempting to guide the tip of your dick inside her without … what? Her not fucking noticing? Or being chill with it?
“Do you want to?”
You can even shorten it to “Want to?” if you want.
That’s it. That’s the only ask in this entire guide, the only thing that doesn’t require you to do nothing but drink. It doesn’t make you a pussy, it doesn’t make you a queer, and in doing so, you can make life better for one half of the world’s population.
And look, dude, I feel you. Your reticence to ask for consent is undeniably evolutionary. Alongside a lot of our other behaviors. We are made to germinate frequently (and with hotties, yo), while women are made for carrying babies.
I agree that’s a perfectly natural feeling.
But a human thing we do – things that may be unnatural, but so are buildings and rocket ships and dairy and snorting fucking Adderral to get through another work day — is suppress our natural urges in order to better aid society.
So fucking do it. Your natural urge is not to wake up and perform trite labor in return for money to purchase food — there is nothing reptilian brain about using Power Point on a MacBook Air — but we do it anyway.
So just give up with all the bullshit. It’s so much easier.
Principle 7: It would be sweet if we could train lizards to use computers
Yea. Yea it would be.