Further reflections on a friend of mine’s recent Facebook post:
I have always hated men. Even when I realized I was one, I still hated us. We are disgusting, vile creatures.
And why do women look down when they see us walking down the street? Because they see us looking at them and they know what’s coming, they know what we’re thinking, they fear that they know, and they are right. They do know what we’re thinking. We are thinking about them. We are thinking about cooking and eating them, taking them home in a brown paper sack where we usually keep our guns, taking them home, boiling them with potatoes and eating them alive piece by piece. We are thinking about splitting them open and looking inside. We are thinking about licking and squeezing. We are thinking the most disgusting things.
Indeed we are awful, awful creatures. This is the fact of it. But here is the worst part: We multiply! And not by our own devices but in concert with the very ones who so rightly despise us! We disgusting creatures multiply ourselves with the knowing participation of women! So it is doubly awful when we see each other on the street because we know of our mutual crime and it disgusts us both horribly. We are locked in awful mutual knowledge of our mutual crimes, the awful spread of us, we who are the disease.
Naturally our collaborators in this world-historical tragedy and crime look down when they see us coming, and we also look down, for we recognize in each other the eternal enemy and contradiction. Not only do women fear us and rightly so but they feel the guilt of our dual enterprise, our foul secret behavior out of which there seems no escape, our instinctual reproduction of the horror. We are matched, twinned while blindfolded in an evil practice over which we seem to have no control. Of course we hate each other and we hate ourselves because of what we do, what we have no control over, our obsession, our cancer. We are vile, vile creatures and yet we mate and reproduce and make more just like us. There is no end to it. There is no escape. We are awful and what’s worse, we are not alone. There are millions of us. The horror of it lives alongside us in the grocery store, in the mall, on the bus, on the street, wherever our eyes lock for a second and then are averted in terror of self-knowledge and reproach.
This eternal crime of which we are both victim and perpetrator, the specter of this, the reality that we cannot look in the face, it is always there, tormenting us, and so we look down and pass each other on the street silently, praying for an end to it all.
