He is everything I dislike about her (which is hard to admit about a friend, who’s now an ex-friend, which should make it easier to admit but doesn’t). The ending wasn’t dramatic; things simply fizzled out, more a loss of touch than crimes of friendship. But still, it’s a hard thing to admit you carried around a list about someone. Not a literal list, just a tallying of irritants and slights tucked up under your ribs. A thing mostly ignored except for a gentle poking during the rough times. I’m not sure what’s harder to admit—that I disliked so many things about her or that I continued the friendship anyway, until I didn’t. Sometimes I wonder if they were soul mates, the way the seemed the same in all the worst ways. I shrug the feeling off because I’m sure people have lists about me. Long, extensive lists about my drawbacks and annoying idiosyncrasies—the way I talk about men, my voice too loud, my laugh too certain.
A few weeks after being back in Vancouver, I went to a party at my friend’s loft apartment. Standing around her kitchen island, in the kind of apartment I’d never be able to afford, I was involved in a heated discussion. I was talking (lecturing) three men about how disgusting it was the way men pressure women beyond their sexual boundaries when this girl stood up from the couch behind us and said, “But you’re taking away women’s agency,” and just like that I let her have mine.
She seemed to think women couldn’t be pressured into sexual acts because we can say no and mean it and end things just like that, and I got confused about my point because of course that was the ideal scenario but here, right in front of me, at this party of lawyers and art directors and bartenders, stood three men who had, only moments before, said that when a woman said no to sex, that it was okay, standard even, to try and convince her. And hadn’t I been convinced and cajoled and pressured and forced and turned my head away and maybe this is what I want because I’m a sex-positive woman and what am I waiting for anyway it’s not like this could possibly change the way he sees me, we’re all enlightened here, right?
The men at the party said that women didn’t always know what they wanted, especially when it came to sex, and then one of them made a comparison between sex and cereal. This full-grown adult man stood in front of me at this party with a face full of absolute sincerity and gave the following example.
He said, “Like, if I offered a woman a bowl of cereal and she said no, but then I was like, hey wait, this cereal might be really good, you’ve never tried this cereal before, how do you even know you don’t want it?”
He said that’s what it was like to talk to a woman, to try to convince her to have sex with him and all the others nodded in agreement. But I couldn’t understand his point because I’ve never not known if I wanted cereal shoved into my body.
My friend, a lawyer, a feminist, my friend leaned over and said, “Because not every girl” and then she nodded in my direction as if to say that not every girl was like me, and I’m not sure if she made the jerk-off motion or that’s just what it felt like but that’s what she meant. She meant that not everyone gives a handjob to get out of a situation where they’ve said no to sex and the man they’re with doesn’t listen, and I went from zero to deserved it before my heart had a chance to skip a beating. Looking back now, I guess it wasn’t so much the list that ended our friendship. I didn’t storm out of the party; I didn’t even really say anything to her about it. But the feeling that she sided with the cereal rapists was a step too far, a belief too unbearable, a taste too sour in my mouth.
Even through my resentment of what had happened at that party, I was jealous of both of them—my friend who’s no longer a friend and that woman from the couch. I wanted to have the same life those women had. I wanted to be someone who had never experienced pressure from men, and further than that I wanted to be a woman who had never caved under the pressure from men. I wondered what their dating lives must be like. My entire dating life can be described in terms of men who don’t listen. Men who ask for pictures when I’ve said no. Men who push for sex when I’ve said kissing was enough. Men who are only vaguely interested until I’ve said that we’re done and then “maybe…,” they say, jamming their foot into the door I’m trying to close. I wrap my fingers around their soles to push them away. I say the door is closed you missed your shot, and they say, “Maybe, we’ll see,” like I’m a ghost or a child or a woman.
Because we’re not friends anymore, when I match with Elias, who I recognize as someone my ex-friend dated a few times, I don’t unmatch. She had told me once that he was an amazing lover, which made it even harder to believe they hadn’t worked out as a couple. They were both intelligent and socially aware while simultaneously lacking self-awareness to a shocking degree. Slick with pretension, they both seemed completely shocked over their dating debacles (which isn’t the same struggle as me, to be clear). I know that I date fools, that I fuck selfish men I will regret letting touch me, that I take risks where risks are perhaps unnecessary. I am (mostly) entirely aware of all the mistakes and missteps I make, even if only in hindsight. I’m also acutely aware of how they’re both conventionally attractive and I am not. Many of my dating choices are made because of this awareness. Neither of them has to make such concessions.