Using feminism as foreplay

Just because he quotes Sylvia Plath doesn’t mean he sees you as human

Have you met the Feminist Man? His girl friends swear he’s a stand-up guy. Yes, he has girl friends. Doesn’t that prove he respects women?

The Feminist Man is a booming advocate for women's rights. He’ll announce (unprompted) that he would never police what you wear. “Whatever makes you feel confident.” He condemns fraternities, stating that they contribute to a toxic culture, enabling men to do as they please without ever being held accountable. He slips in a jab about how any guy who survives hazing “clearly has no self-respect.” He mentions he’s close with his mom. Close, but not Freudian. He values her opinion, but will ultimately make his own decisions. He’s a grown man after all. He’s baffled by anyone who hates Taylor Swift. “Society just hates to see a woman succeed and earn a fuck-ton of money,” he proclaims, as if he’s just solved misogyny with a single sentence.

He even asks you questions. He watches your face warm with surprise as you murmur, “No one’s asked me that before.” He wants to be the first. He nods along, eyes locked on yours. Never your chest, never your lips. He isn’t like that. He genuinely cares. Isn’t that more than the average man offers these days?

Every thoughtful nod is wired to a silent scoreboard in his head. He thrills at your astonishment. “Guys never say that!” Your gasps confirm that the performance is working. Over time, the curtain begins to close. He stops rehearsing his lines from the Feminist Manifesto. The subtext grows louder: he wants your clothes on the floor and nothing more.

There’s an unsettling, twisted nature of the Feminist Man. You start to see the glitch in his matrix of allyship. It all begins when the “I respect women” brand peels off to reveal a con man who’s memorized the language of liberation. He’s worse than the brazen misogynist because, this time, you lowered your guard. He swore he wasn’t like the others and he’s right. He’s worse. The others didn’t dangle feminism like a shiny object to gain access to your vulnerability. He did, using your stories as nothing more than a stepping stone.

He didn’t care about the niche things you’re passionate about, the mistakes you made with your past loves, the fights that keep you awake at night. The saddest part is you believed he genuinely did. The questions were nothing more than checkpoints on his speed-run to intimacy.

You wonder when his sincerity dissolved into strategy—if sincerity ever existed at all. You curse yourself for choosing optimism in a cynical world. You wanted to believe that there really are good guys out there—something your mom always tells you. You wanted to prove her right, believing that chivalry could survive without a hidden agenda. You wanted to choose softness in a world that so often punishes it.

You nearly feel guilty for allowing disappointment to linger like a sour taste in your mouth. All you hear is a cruel refrain on repeat: You should’ve known better. Why would you ever take off the armor you worked so hard to build? The cruelest twist is that your anger points inward more than at him. You’re furious at yourself for applauding a bare-minimum performance—one that you should’ve exited during intermission.

Men disappoint. It’s nothing new. Believing them is.

But even the smartest, wisest women can be fooled by a well-lit stage and perfectly rehearsed script. Choosing to believe doesn’t make you foolish, it makes him pathetic for needing to create a character to be liked, even for just a short while.

I’ve met the Feminist Man who voted for Kamala Harris and has a sister. He mocked the male species like he wasn’t part of it—as if he was the one good one. He asked me my favorite piece I’d ever written. I was so floored all I could say was, “Good question. I don’t know.” I somehow felt comfortable enough to tell him about the fallout I had with my best friend when I was seventeen. He felt comfortable enough to tell me about how he lost his best friend because they both had a crush on the same girl. I joked that it sounded like a bad movie plot, and he laughed.

Late one night, he asked me to talk. His eyes were bloodshot from alcohol, and suddenly all of the comfort I once felt disappeared. My body turned cold. My legs and hands trembled so terribly that I gripped my thighs just to steady myself. He said he liked me, a smug smile tugging at the corner of his lips. I said I didn’t feel the same. He said I was a terrible liar. I told him I wasn’t lying. That didn’t wipe the whiskey smirk from his face. He said he was drunk, as if I couldn’t smell it on his breath. I suggested he sleep it off and we save the conversation for later. He persisted. He told me I wasn’t drunk enough for the conversation. And for the first time in my life, I was genuinely scared that a man might do something bad to me.

In the moment, I thought: I can never look at you the same. He had deceived even me—someone who prides herself on knowing good from bad. I didn’t sleep for two hours after because my body was still shaking and my mind was still racing. The next day, he told me he didn’t remember the conversation, as if forgetting could undo it.

He said he was mortified. What did he think I was?

“That’s not reflective of who I am as a person,” he told me. But it was, and I lived it. The Feminist Man isn’t rare, he’s rehearsed. I won’t let him pretend I imagined the script. Here he is, etched into the lines of something he never thought he’d inspire. Maybe that’s what the fear really is: being seen clearly.

My favorite work, he asks? This one.

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