This is an out-loud on my turmoil of feelings hearing more about so-called incels. It's like knowing you have rats, then coming upon a giant nest of them.
I can't remember exactly when I realized that many men don't view women as actual people. Often, even men who know perfectly well we are people have to remind themselves that it's not just the women in their immediate vicinity who are actually humans. It's also that "girl" being posed on a car for your gratification. She is a person with thoughts and feelings about what is happening. She poops on the toilet and got an 87% in grade 12 calculus and thinks about why she's on Earth. Just like you.
For men to view us as a subspecies, they must see themselves as more human than us. Somehow, even though science says otherwise, they believe their feelings are more acute, their thoughts more profound, their bodies more normal, their ways more right. We are a subspecies, not unlike a donkey or cow, with some consciousness but nothing to concern themselves with. We only need to be understood and manipulated to men's needs, like all the other animals. It's not even insulting, because it's so ignorant. It's the thinking of a small child, cemented and rooted without anyone noticing.
I always thought this undercurrent of people with vaginas not being as human as people with penises was unconscious. I felt like, most men, they don't mean to think of things that way, it's just how they've been taught. Most men who take the time can recognize that I am a person, that a biological accident of genitalia doesn't diminish the intensity and importance of my soul's human experience on Earth. And yet, there are swaths of men, scuttling around under the surface of the internet, encouraging each other to dehumanize me. So it's not unconscious, and I'm willing to bet, most men are not surprised it's there, even if they might be surprised when they find it scuttling around the underbelly of their own unconscious.
I think female people have shielded male people for too long about the importance of sex to us. Maybe we've let you think we see it as casually as you do. I'm sure there are women who do. But please, take a minute to think about it. Sex, to a male body, is sticking your dick into something warm until you feel the ecstasy of orgasm. Sex, for a female body, is allowing a foreign object, attached to a large, hairy body, not just to enter my body, but to pump away at my most vulnerable bodily opening until the penis spews gooey, stinky stuff that will leak out of me for hours and may make me pregnant or sick. But I might like how it feels, and if I'm lucky, that will result in an orgasm. If I'm unlucky, it will hurt or cause my body damage.
Sex isn't very sexy, when you think about the reality of the human experience divorced from the ecstasy of orgasm. The rest of it is quite intrusive for a woman. Sex is a big fucking deal, literally. It's not something small to give you as a reward for a nice night out. Also, a large number of people have been victims of sexual assault. For a person who's been hurt by sexual violence, sex is a giant mountain of trust to climb, not a home run.
Personally, I enjoy heterosexual sex, but I definitely don't want to have it with a man who doesn't care about my experience, with whom I don't feel safe. I think any man, if he were to think about having sex as having something large inserted and pumped inside his body at the most vulnerable part, could understand those stipulations. Sex isn't something I give to someone, it isn't a party favour or a prize. Sex is something I do with someone with whom I feel intimate. It's a real risk, physically, not just emotionally.
If a man is incapable of seeing me as a human, we can never really be intimate. If I can't be intimate with a man, I don't want to have sex with him. This is a very basic understanding. If you want to have sex on the regular, you have to build trusting, respectful relationships that encourage intimacy. If you don't want to do that, don't blame other people. Maybe some people would want to have sex with you if you were a person capable of intimacy with them. Go work on that, and things might change. But keep jacking off to your imagination and whining when reality doesn't match, and your life will continue to be consumed with hatred that is really directed at yourself. When you hate yourself, of course your ego directs the anger outside of you, like shielding you from bullets. But it's destroying you.
Love feels better.
