“Who knows! Every woman’s different and things are always changing. Listen, I’m not sure what you’re trying to get out of me here. Again: I’m not a woman.”

Sure, he’s aware of that, he replies, but it’s important to him, especially as a cisgender heterosexual white man, to avoid placing the burden of educating him about women’s experiences on a woman, which is why it’s so great to have friends of other genders.

His friend says, “Yeah, I guess.”

At home, legs trembling full of acid, grimacing, he peels off his bloody broken half toenail. The wound looks like a cut pomegranate and he dabs it with alcohol, adding injury to injury, the pain piercing an opening inside him through which more tearful laughter escapes. He does feel somewhat guilty about what he did, yet he will not deny that it felt so, so good to ruin the evenings of the tyrannical assholes who loved to dehumanize innocent single narrow-shouldered men. Just a quick startle, no harm done. Actually, he’s the one who was harmed. The only thing that bothers him is that he knows no one would condone what he did.

We’ve known each other a long time and if it’s one thing I know, it’s that you always manage to convince yourself that when you act out, you’re only hurting yourself, or are justified in hurting others as long as you suffer too. I do not think it is unfair to say you have a habit of passively consenting to miserable situations, or even baiting them out of people, so you can later weaponize your sadness. Like you’ve even joked about how you do that. I’ve seen it, the obvious glee you take in talking about how awful men have been to you, and now it looks like you’ve decided to make me one of them. I guess you believe that’s what makes you sympathetic, or you need it to lend gravitas to otherwise ordinary dissatisfaction. You want to drag people down into the mud with you. And when it backfires, because why would it not backfire, you fall back to your bunker of victimhood. It’s a good thing Cece has a sense of humor, I talked to her and she forgives you even though she didn’t have to, but she didn’t do anything to deserve this kind of treatment, and if it keeps up then I don’t know what’s gonna happen with you and me. PS for future reference, Cece is Korean, not Filipina (like how did you even land on Filipina? That’s so random). -N

So, she went too far: fine. All she cares about is how she can make him own his share of the blame. Confront him with her grievances? No, that’d look petulant and reactive. Could she respond with a simple “lol”? Being glib would give him an excuse to sever their friendship with equally low effort, and he’d probably feel more relief than guilt. Ignore him? Wounded, weak, mind-gamey, plus, her absence would be punitive only if he cared about her. Retaliation is impossible when he’s doing so well. All she can do is scrabble around in ineffectual rage like a cat chasing a laser.

The date is powerfully bad. He’s so weenily deferential, over-groomed in his little blazer with a graphic tee and matching Vans and raw selvedge denim. He has that sort of lenticular baldness where you can see the thinning patches only at an angle. Unlike most guys, he does ask her questions about herself, albeit terminally dull ones of the sort you’d ask to calibrate a polygraph test—what do you do, where have you lived, what’ve you been reading lately. She pays attention only to gather cruel observations to pass on to the group chat later. As her date finishes describing his job at a low-income women’s health-care startup, she watches his teeth, which are too shiny, like they’ve been freshly zambonied. Veneers probably.

She has no intention of going home with this guy, until after three whiskey-gingers she starts talking about how bloated she’ll be tomorrow, which somehow doglegs the conversation toward her eating disorder, then her situation with Neil. The Feminist’s attention activates like some motion-sensing light. Though he’s been laughing at everything she says, whether she’s being funny or not, it turns out he’s the kind of guy who’s only fully engaged when she’s talking about her pain, who subtly steers conversations in that direction, because it furnishes an opportunity for him to demonstrate caring, which is not the same as caring. He goes mercifully silent except for Wow and That sounds tough. She is being genuine, knows she’s on some level indulging him and hates it. When a stranger’s pool cue comes too close to her face she slaps it to the floor.

No surprise, then, that she finds solace in the simplicity of hate—how comforting it feels to hate Neil, how succulent the fantasy that the world’s full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy, and that to hate him silently, invent ways to undermine him, conscript others into this project, was to increase the world’s fairness.

The main outcome of all this is to make Alison wonder if she should start a podcast, maybe one about owning a raven, though she has nothing to say besides Don’t. [...]

On one of these nights, attempting to break these self-soothing habits, which make her hate herself in an intimately special way, she adapts an exercise from her old therapist, who once had her write a list of things she liked about herself; instead she makes a list of everything she dislikes about Neil. He rejected her, for one. He’s not that great in bed, not so good-looking, kind of bad with money. One time he flaked on her birthday party, though he bought her a nice bomber jacket to apologize. The nipple-sucking thing was goofy too, wasn’t it? Could it mean he has mommy issues? But every guy has mommy issues. And daddy issues. As did she. In fact, reviewing her list, the problem is not only that much of the list applies equally to her, but also that none of it is that bad, so it functions as an index of his forgivable humanity, reminding her that it might’ve worked out, if she were a better person. What hurts the most is knowing that his rejection of her was fair.

After this, she lies in bed weeping with her lips pressed together, and finds herself submerged in a fantasy of her and Neil years in the future, spooning in bed in the dark, with her telling him in a low dignified voice about how miserable he’d made her when he rejected her, how alone she thought she’d be for the rest of her life, and he would take this seriously and say, I’m sorry, I couldn’t see what we had, the whole time I was really just scared because I knew how good it could be and how crushed I’d be if it didn’t work out, but it DID work out after all, and here we are and I’m sorry, I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you, now he’d kiss the back of her neck, and she would turn to him super slowly with her eyes open in the dark and say that he never really liked her, and he’d say, You know that’s not true, Alison, you’re the best person I know, you’re the only person I’ve ever cared about, the funniest smartest person I’ve ever met, and your body is so fucking hot and TINY and sexy, I just know you’re going to be a huge success one day and I’ll be there to support you the whole time. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry sorry sorry and then they would fuck. In this fantasy she is also the only woman on earth, so he would not be able to leave her even if he wanted to, and even if she was the worst, she was also the best.

The film reel ends there and she reenters her body back in bed, always already alone, ruined by how infantile and self-serving her fantasy was, moreover impossible, since she knew she would never get Neil to love her, or receive an apology from him, or ever hear any of those nice things from anyone because they were not, any of them, true.