I HATE MEN AND MEN HATE ME

A SERIES OF VIGNETTES

Valerie Solanas

‘You’re the worst person I’ve ever met.’ He says.

It’s with a smile on his face, half-joking, but it doesn’t quite meet his eyes. I’m at a party in January. It’s pretty quiet, overall. It’s a split bottle of £6 white wine and talking to strangers over music that’s just slightly too loud to speak comfortably and slightly too quiet to actually dance. I’ve just about given up on a horrifically painful conversation. Hugo (let’s call him) is moving into my friends flat. I’ve never met him before, but you know the type. Mullet, moustache, musician – must I go on? I’d been giving him a hard time about his taste in music – ironically, a very male douchebag kind of a move. Eventually he snaps, and says it, and I laugh in half-embarrassment, half-disbelief. But the thing is, I know that I’m being shitty. I’m being rude and combative and demeaning, and I’m doing it on purpose. I do this a lot to men that I meet. We both know he’s right – in many ways, I am the worst person he has ever met. Or at least, the worst person he’s met at this party.

I want to say that I wasn’t always like this, but the thing is, I think I was.

It’s year nine and I’m smoking for the first time. My location is off, I’ve told my mum I’m staying at my friends and the air is thick both with the prospect of fourteen-year-olds transgressing for the very first time and remarkably shitty weed. We’re sitting in the anonymous grass square that used to exist behind the Royal Free. I’m with a friend and two strangers – boys my age. We met for the first time last week, and we’re united in our determination to cough the least. I offer a challenge – I’ve been significantly combative throughout the evening: loud, and distracting, and generally annoying. I ask one of the boys what he thinks of me. I put myself out on the table for scrutiny, sadistic and obsessed. And he calls me effervescent. I remember his blonde, screwed-up little face saying it. The beat of silence afterwards is so long that he tries to explain what the word means. I shoot back with an insult, an argument, I call him misogynistic for the assumption. I pick a fight and once we leave, the boy never speaks to me again. I take the shiny little bubble of a compliment and I shit all over it. It wasn’t what I had wanted, I realised after. I had wanted him to insult me.

That same year, I’m at my Jewish Studies GCSE class from six to nine every Wednesday night. It’s me, Lily, and seven of my male peers. They tell me to get back in the kitchen every time I answer a question right. I’m sure it was funny at the time, but all I remember is the red carpet in that room, the anger that tightened my throat, the dashboard of the car I stared at on my way home while my father tells me to ignore them, the teacher who told us that women were actually very happy with being treated as separate but equal. I get at least three grades higher than the boy who seems to take the most joy out of asking for a sandwich, and I revel in my victory. Five years later, he smiles through his teeth and jokingly asks me to ‘Actually just shut your mouth,’ at a café with mutual friends. My stomach hardens and I want to take my fourteen-year-old self by the shoulders and shake her. She was right to expect the blonde boy to be horrible. She had been right all along.

I can take it back further – to August 2007, to an early morning in which my grandmother is pulled from her bed to comfort an apoplectic four-and-a-half-year-old who’s just discovered her mother has not, in fact, given birth to what she was sure would be her third sister, and instead, has brought a boy into her family. This one I have no explanation for, no pre-emptive strike. All I remember is the fury that filled up my whole body at the thought of a man in my house.

I don’t want to exaggerate, but I also don’t want to underplay the deep-seated hatred that I have felt for men for many, many years of my life. It’s been a joke – it’s been a great bit – I’m the friend you’re most nervous to have meet your boyfriend. Because I will ask him what your zodiac is, and if he can’t answer – that’s not for me to judge. That’s just for me to provide you with that information. I speak to men as little as I can, I actively avoid them. It is not surprising to any of my friends when I recount the horrors of attempted smalltalk at that party.

Ages seven to sixteen, I go to a girl’s school. We press ourselves up against the floor to ceiling glass windows of our recently refurbished concrete block of a classroom to stare at any boy who is unfortunate enough to walk by on the street. A boy was a sacred, half-formed thing. It was our mission, in rooms filled with women, to decode this unsaid mystery. The rules had changed, inexplicably. Anodyne weekends of sleepovers and secret-keeping were no more. I was confused at how my friends started acting at boy-girl parties. I didn’t understand why everyone at this high-performing London private school suddenly found physics super hard, actually. I quickly tired of talking about the guy my best friend liked – and we were only six months into the six-year nuclear explosion that they turned out to be. I had a bone to pick with these unknown peoples taking my friends away.

Then there was the other thing - I was never going to be a viable romantic option to anyone. Being ugly and uncool and queer in secondary school was great for my art but terrible for my self-esteem. I was determined not to be made fun of for lagging so far behind my peers. So I had to be funny, and quick on my feet and go straight for the jugular. I walked around with my chest red raw, desperate to be seen as an equal. I wanted to make sure that whoever he was, he would blink first. Thin skin and sharp teeth did not serve me the way I wanted. Turns out, being shitty as a teenager to other teenagers doesn’t make them respect you. So I stopped going to parties, or stopped getting invited. I shut up when boys came up in conversation. And I let the anger ferment in my gut.

Men are not worth your time. Men are beneath you. Men are trash. Men are not people. I repeat these mantras every morning for years of my life. I say it to my sister, to my parents, to my friend who confesses over FaceTime ‘I didn’t realise you could be funny in front of boys,’ and I feel the little hairline cracks in my chest every time. I’m sure, if you have known me for even a short while, you have heard some kind of an epithet along this line. For a very long time, I was a thing like a knife or a peach gone sour or a month with 28 days or a very bitter, angry young woman.

Sharp cut to a Friday night in the East Village, let’s say, this May, and I’m meeting a boy at a dive bar for a drink. He’s in dungarees – he calls them overalls – and immediately I feel my eyes try to roll to the back of my head. I’ve been going out with a lot of musicians, much to my chagrin. There seems to be a surplus of bass players in downtown Manhattan, and he seems to be one of them. I let him talk jazz at me for twenty minutes – I don’t tell him I have already well and truly served my time in the WAG scene. I mostly just enjoy the free drinks – American men are as serious about picking up the check as British men are at splitting the bill. The bartender gives us free shots and I wonder what’s in the air this spring. Some other guy (also, regrettably, musician) has already sent me two bulk bags of teabags and a $100 wine voucher, ‘So I can be bri’ish’ he explains on the note in the package. He’s never met me before. There’s no sense of etiquette in reply times – I refuse to save anyone’s number, so there’s two or three (+1)s in my iMessage at any given time. A man stops me in the street to compliment my outfit. A man at a bar follows me to three others in the hopes I’ll take him home. It gets boring pretty quickly.

This is a pivot I swing to every so often - like when I was catastrophically dumped in first year. I hit the clubs so hard in the subsequent months, I was unable to list the strangers I had drunkenly kissed, stopping after I got to a number I do not feel comfortable repeating. But it is just another method of control. It’s no different from starving, or throwing up, or running a shaving blade down an arm. And it turns out, this method is just as easy. But it gets old fast. And is just another way of removing myself from a situation in which I have to be vulnerable with anyone. Don’t try to make me breakfast or take me to a Mets game. Don’t treat me like a person. All I see is the screwed-up face of that little blonde boy. I will refuse.

The refusal was lifted, once. My first real attempt at emotional vulnerability with men is at age sixteen. This first boy space friend is different. He’s not like the others. And he, in turn, doesn’t think that I’m like the other girls. It was a relationship based upon a preconceived revulsion of the opposite gender, and the one person we expected to dissipate all reservations. In other words, a relationship inevitably doomed to end in mutual disappointment. We facetime constantly and we talk about everything. Well, mostly his dad, and his academic failings, but also sometimes about the girls he likes, and you know, we must have touched upon me at some point, I’m sure. I’m in a relationship, and I take smug pride in the fact he isn’t interested in me. He, a boy, just thinks I’m so incredibly cool that it doesn’t matter to him that I’m not a viable romantic option. He invites me on holiday to France with his family and I jump at the opportunity. 

And then, of course, The Thing happens. The Thing that always somehow seems to happen with boys you think are your friends, and I start avoiding him when we get home without really understanding why. I tell my friend, jokingly, six months later, and she goes ‘Hey, doesn’t that kind of sound like ______?’ and of course, it was. And I kind of roll my eyes at my naivety, thinking he genuinely cared about what I had to say. It wasn’t anything to press charges for, and not something that left me with any lingering trauma, but that’s all it takes. No more male friends. I refuse. 

My therapist says that I don’t like interacting with men because I subconsciously feel as though I am betraying some sisterhood in favour of my father. I think this is almost as unoriginal and cliché as quoting your therapist in a substack article. But then, what you have to understand is that at some point in the past two decades, my sister and I were split from the same person into two wild horses running and running a race across some wild old English moor. It’s a race that neither of us knew why we were running but only that each of us individually had to win at whatever cost. We miss each other. I’m always thinking of things that I can’t tell her. She once sent me a book to read about the two sisters being the loves of each other’s lives. We know this is true – we know that the scars instilled in us bound us together. I still cannot forgive her for what she did though. I’m sure she cannot forgive me. I will never trust her truly. I will always hold her at arm’s length. I will always feel immense guilt and mourning for doing so. I miss you! I want to yell at her. Come back! Play with me like you used to!

So, there it is. I hate men and men hate me. This is the way it has always been. I am young and terrified of the anger I hold inside my body. I don’t know where to put it.

Two summers ago, on my first grand New York excursion, I’m irresponsibly drunk on the M1 back uptown early in the morning. I am staying at the same women’s hostel that Sylvia Plath writes about in The Bell Jar, mostly because she wrote about it in The Bell Jar, because there’s no other reason to live on 92^nd street. My head is sort of slumped by the window, and my headphones are in and loud, playing something off the Melodrama album. (it’s also my big heartbreak summer) Out of my peripheral vision I notice a little black dot coming towards me. The bus is nearly empty. There is a man, a tall, full-grown one who’s making his way straight over to me. This is not a good sign in New York. The number one rule of not getting murdered is fastidiously avoiding eye contact with anyone in public space, lest you accidentally pose a challenge. Ignore whoever is shitting in your subway car, so that they don’t try to smear it on you. But this guy, he’s making a beeline – he definitely wants me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I register that this is probably the story of how I meet my (hopefully) creative and (embarrassingly) predictable end. Before I can properly register the danger I am in, he’s grabbing my wrist. ‘I want you to have this,’ he says. He pushes something into my palm. He gets off the bus. The whole thing is so bizarre and fast that I barely register it. I wake up the next day, Cinderella-style, to a Tito’s vodka lanyard on my desk. It is, in a very silly and ironic and metaphorical way, the catalyst to humanising men. This guy was clearly off his face. He could have hurt me pretty badly with very low consequences. He gives me a gift instead. It feels big, it feels like a proper metaphor to my eighteen-year-old self.

And I don’t want to be this angry anymore.

Up until July of last summer, I had one straight guy friend. Nick is in my A-Level history class. The window is open in March, because we’re out of the second lockdown, and the building works across the road are searing into our classroom with the sounds of mental against stone. My stupid, broken ears make it difficult to not feel as though I am in an active hostage situation. I’m trying very hard to mask the fact I am about to go into a full-scale panic attack. ‘Are you okay, Ellie?’ the teacher asks. I am much more mortified about interrupting yet another lesson with my mystery disability than actually learning the content of my A-Level, so I wave her away, and build my levels of distress to a farcical level. I jump a little too hard, and then suddenly I hear the sliding of a window. Some guy who I’ve never spoken to, bar his complimenting of one of my jackets three months ago, has gotten up, and silently closed all of them. I almost cry. This is how I meet him.

Nick’s going out with one of my friends, and I meet him constantly at parties throughout the summer. He keeps asking me for coffee, and I keep blowing him off – no matter how many windows a guy will silently close to accommodate for your hidden disability, you are stoic in your resolution. No male friends. Until, he has enough, and stops me at a party. ‘You say you want to get coffee and you never do. Don’t lie, just tell me no,’ he says. This confrontation is what finally gets me to brunch. I am, admittedly, impressed. He pulls out my chair, and he insists on paying, and we’re both so unbelievably uncomfortable by the end of the ordeal at a place that’s way too fancy for two teenagers, that we end up getting drunk on Primrose Hill at 2pm. This begins a long and beautiful tradition that Nick and I have sustained throughout the years: getting absolutely plastered together. I owe him my love of Guinness, a mild case of alcohol poisoning in the summer of first year, and the belief that some men actually give a shit about what you have to say.

It takes a while but slowly, I feel myself becoming softer. I look up in January this year, the same year I am told by some guy at a party that I’m the worst person he’s ever met, and I realise I have a handful of boy space friends. I experience varying degrees of shock and horror. Without realising, compassion has crept up my spine. This new life cannot cost the old one. I am not willing to let go of the women who have shaped me. The look that passes between you and the other girl on the tube when a man starts screaming. The older woman who you always go to first to ask for directions. My hair was a gift from my great-grandmother, and it’s been handed down to me from women who have crossed oceans to give me the life that I lead. My sisters are the centre of the universe – the double Aquarius in my moon and rising. But I don’t have to. I love my brother the same fierce way. He and I, twin flames, born four days apart.

These boys aren’t different from the others - I am no longer so naïve. These boys are just people. But they are, as it turns out, pretty great people. One of them is the funniest person I know - I want to make him laugh more than anyone in the world. One of them gives me a guidebook he found in his house from the 90s to explore New York with. One of them ends up in my kitchen in the early hours and wheedles me into singing the Joan Baez parts of his Bob Dylan covers. One sends me long texts from the other side of the world about my writing. And of course, I’m half in love with most of them half the time, but that’s how I am with all my friends. It turns out that it’s much easier to be in love than to be determined in hatred. It’s not a particularly profound lesson, but it’s one that took me longer to learn than I realised.

Here’s what it comes down to: talk a big talk all your life about decentring men. Turn your nose up in a humanities degree that treats the rare sighting of a straight man like a unicorn to be hunted at the expense of any other women in your life. Treat them like shit, just to be the first person to ever knock their egos. It’s a great bit, and it gets you good stories from bad parties. Tell everyone, as loud as you can, with a megaphone on a high street - I HATE MEN AND MEN HATE ME! - take pride in it.

But eventually, you’re going to have to realise that hating men isn’t decentring them, it’s just putting them on the same pedestal with different lighting. It’s basically just another way of setting yourself apart from other women. I’m not like the rest of you, I’m better, because I see through this guy, and I don’t need his approval. Except, I’m vying just as hard for his attention. All my jaded, bitter years of complete dismissal of any potential contributions they could have to society at large, were punctuated, subtly, subconsciously, with the fear that spikes the hatred. Men could not hurt me, because I would hurt them first. And I was very, very scared of being hurt.

This year I am starting over. With caution and a short temper and a knowing that I will probably be disappointed at some point because all friendships have growing pains but most of them are worth it.

I will get hurt. This is the point of living.