Why I Used to Hate Women (pt.1)
As someone who’s pretty vocal about patriarchy and misogyny and other such things, would it surprise you to find out that I used to be massively misogynistic?
Alas, indeed, it’s true. I used to really dislike women. I believed the societal narrative about my gender’s inferiority from a disturbingly young age, and then, most females I met throughout my formative life more or less fit the negative stereotypes, thus leaving me utterly disillusioned with women.
It wasn’t until alarmingly recently when I realized maybe I had been indoctrinated into something unkind and perhaps women were not all that bad.
Note: Holy crap I have so many negative stories about women that I feel like I need to split this into two separate articles just to keep it from getting too long — one from before Finland and one from when I moved here.
Depicted here: not me
First there was Jodi…
In elementary school, I sometimes went to play with a girl named Jodi who lived in the same neighborhood. Jodi and I had a lot in common, like loving cats and animal toys, but she was impossible for me to have fun with sometimes, because she was extremely bossy and controlling.
The scenario I distinctly remember was playing with Littlest Pet Shops. Not the freaky bobblehead ones from nowadays, but the original ones that looked more like actual animals.(1) We’d put all our toys in a pile and on the first play date, she’d get to pick who she wanted to play with. However, when it was my turn to pick first, I recalled that she had some sets I didn’t have and wanted to play with, but she wouldn’t let me play with her toys.
This bothered me, naturally. I’ve been very sensitive to equality in relationships probably ever since, because the rules weren’t the same for both of us, and that didn’t make sense to me. It meant, ultimately, to my grade-4 brain that she wasn’t a good friend.
Then there was Jessica…
In grade 5, we had a new girl at elementary school, Jessica. I have a funny memory gap here, because I remember being hugely jealous of all the new girl attention she got but I have zero memory as to how we became best friends. She and I were so close, eventually, that our moms also became friends and we even did our family trips to the mountains for Christmas together.
But by grade 6, when we moved up to middle school, Jessica just kinda stopped hanging out with me. Stopped eating lunch with me. Stopped talking to me altogether. She apparently made friends with some cooler kids and then decided that I wasn’t cool enough to introduce to them, so she blew me off. By high school, she was telling people “I used to be such a loser. I used to hang out with Bear Wiseman.”
The middle school mess…
So, without Jessica by my side, I was pretty lost in middle school. There were three tiers of popular cliques (2): the untouchable hot ones… a few were nice but most were super stuck up. Then there was the arguably worse second tier hot people, who were your kind of stereotypical douchebag popular kids with one or two decent ones mixed in. And then there was the third tier, who were still cool enough that they could date up, but not generally cool enough to hang out regularly above their group.
I made friends with a few of the girls in third tier, but if I’m being honest, I wish in hindsight that I had slummed it to fourth tier — nerdier girls who weren’t considered cool, but were a lot more honest about who they were and what they liked, and were generally a lot nice. But I was a shitty, judgmental teenager, too, so I cared more about status (3), apparently, than having actual friends.
Third tier was not enjoyable for me. I had nothing to talk to these girls about. I liked video games and had just discovered heavy metal. I couldn’t give two fucks about pop music or clothes or makeup, or the “girl” things. I was expected to perform femininity that I didn’t relate to just to fit in, when what I wanted to talk about was hiking, and camping, and video games, and fantasy books. So, I’d be treated as part of the friend group during school, even though I was last to be picked on any team project, and of course I’d be hearing about their weekend endeavors that they consistently forgot to invite me to.
I was still friends with those girls in grade 9 when we moved up to high school. But that didn’t last more than a few months at best.
Why, you might ask? Because at some point, a bunch of us were standing in the foyer and I was standing right behind this girl named Aleah. Now, I’d known of Aleah all throughout middle school, but truly, I had never had a conversation with her. She decided to announce, out of nowhere, “You know who I really hate? Bear Wiseman.”
It wasn’t the comment that got me. In fact, I paid so little attention to her that I didn’t even hear her say it, but I recalled one of my “friends” saying, “wow Aleah, biiitch.” She was pretty horrendously embarrassed, rightfully so, but she never apologized or even said anything to me after. And when none of those girls showed any true loyalty to me beyond “wow, biiitch” in the moment, I decided that I wasn’t going to waste my time on them anymore.
My high school bestie, Heather…
This story probably deserves an article of its own… perhaps another time.
Not too long after I smokebombed out of tier three, I met a girl named Heather in my drama class and she was a bit like me… weird and quasi-friendless. She also dabbled in tier four but likewise didn’t seem to have any really consistent friends.
We became besties. For the next 2 years, she was at my side most of the time. We did everything together. We’d play video games, watch movies, have sleepovers in the same bed, all the usual things that teenaged girls do together. If she bailed on school once in a while (her family was Mormon, so she was pretty rebellious), I was totally lost and alone.
But something never felt quite right. There was an echo of distance between us, that familiar imbalance that I got from Jodi, only… vaguer. I trusted her with all of the explicit details of my life, but she apparently didn’t have that same trust in me. I had given a lot of my deepest inner secrets to her and the fact that she had been lying to me about who she was felt like the deepest betrayal. I’m extremely loyal, so realizing that same loyalty was not afforded me was a huge blow.
There were actually a lot of other issues that fractured that friendship, but most of them related to teenagers being assholes. I was very guilty of slut shaming, for example, because I was also a shitty teenager with no emotional maturity. I am glad that we’re still on friendly terms though and have been for ages now, even if we’re not close anymore.(4)
Next up: Erin from Ontario…
Content warning: mention of SA
After high school, in 2005, I worked out at a mountain resort with my then-bestie (male) and mid-season, I became good friends with a new girl named Erin.
Erin was getting a bit of a fresh start out in the mountains, which is probably why most of her super toxic traits didn’t show up at first — she was outside of her usual social circles. In fact, I didn’t learn that lesson until I went to visit her in Ontario. Beyond the stereotypical insecure-attention-seeker nonsense, I’m pretty sure the moment I realized I wanted nothing more to do with her was when she tried to force a nonconsensual threesome with me and another dude I was crashing on a foldout couch with after a drunken karaoke night. To add insult to SA, she then lied afterwards to all of these new acquaintances that she came downstairs and walked in on us having sex.(5)
After that visit, needless to say, I didn’t feel like upkeeping the friendship. Funnily enough, I think the friends I did make in Ontario also just kinda sorta stopped hanging out with her over time. I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t like a drama queen. I do feel super sorry for any kids she has though, because she for sure got knocked up and framed it as “we’re expecting our first child” with a dude who already hated her by that point.
My childhood friend, Danielle…
By around 2008ish, I was seeing a guy who had a friendgirl (I forget her name… maybe Tina?) who happened to be friends with a girl that I had grown up with, Danielle.
Danielle had lived across the street from me and had probably the saddest family situation in our whole middle-to-upper-class neighborhood, at least that I knew about. She had a skeevy drunken dad (he had a whole room in the basement filled floor to ceiling with porno mags that wasn’t locked or anything) and an equally skeevy bad stereotype of a chain-smoking bingo mom. I remember their house for smelling like cigarettes, for their carpet being disgusting and covered in glue, etc. (because no one ever cleaned properly), and for Danielle being given anything she wanted because her parents didn’t want to do any actual parenting.
She was fun though — I got to be the cool older person to her and she got say she had a friend that was 3 years older at an age when that was a massive brag. She and I used to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Power Rangers on the trampoline together, and I would go to her house to play with Barbies and do other things I was not allowed to do at my own house, like be messy.(6)
Now, when I went to middle school, Danielle and I didn’t play together much anymore, and eventually her mom and dad split up and she moved elsewhere in town. We did cross over in my last year of high school though, which was friendly but did not rekindle anything.
Danielle didn’t have the most stable or nice life, and by high school, she was a fully-fledged mean girl. She was gorgeous per the usual societal standards, but despite being easily one of the most traditionally pretty girls in school, she was also once quoted saying, “I’m so severely insecure that the only way I can feel good about myself is to make other women feel bad.” I guess bonus points for being self-aware, but double negative points for not working on it?
By high school, Danielle was also the type who would do the stupidest and most dramatic things just to prove that she wasn’t being stupid and dramatic. Like, she was the girl who would have loud, obnoxious public fights with her boyfriend, only to be making out equally obnoxiously and publicly an hour later. It always felt like a need for attention, which made sense having lived across from her family for so long.
After high school, this guy proposed to her and she had asked me my thoughts. Thing was, I knew back then that she wanted reassurance, not honesty. Since I couldn’t honestly say that I thought marrying him was a good idea (it wasn’t even her terrible relationship, per se — I didn’t think marrying anyone straight out of high school was smart), I told her the same thing I’d tell anyone who wants to make a big life decision when they’re young: that only she could make decisions for herself and other people can think what they want, but ultimately, she should do what feels right and makes her happy. And I stand by that advice.
All I remember from there on was that I had talked to maybe-Tina about Danielle and had said, in confidence, that, “Yeah, I can’t imagine that [her marriage] will go well, but it’s her life and her choice, so I wish her the best one way or the other.” I guess maybe-Tina decided to tell Danielle some version of that. Who knows how she paraphrased it but to no one’s surprise, Danielle took that the worst imaginable way, and lashed out at me. I don’t even remember the details, but there was a lot of “You never supported me!” in there. Eventually, no matter how much you sympathize with someone’s life circumstances, that sympathy will dry up when they weaponize their insecurities against you. I have no room for Karens in my life.
So then I moved to Europe…
As I said, this is getting quite long, but suffice to say, I hoped for a fresh start when I went to Europe. For better or for worse, I do have infinitely more female friends now than I did in 2009, but they’ve still been hard-won.
I’ll continue this on Thursday.
Until then, stay balanced, my friends! ❤️🐻
1 Shame I sold all of those at garage sales because apparently they’re worth a small fortune now.
2 No, I do not condone school hierarchies, but it was what it was.
3 Familial indoctrination, probably.
4 In the gap here, there were my Christian friends. I am still friends with two of them. One of them was banished from the group after high school by the others and I stopped talking to her because I caught her lying to me. There was occasional weird drama here and there, enough to give a few more examples of weird “girl behavior,” but not enough for me to be resentful.
5 Of note, I was still a virgin and all of them knew that. But maybe I should thank her, because the shitty dude I had a crush on wouldn’t sleep with me because he thought I was now “sloppy seconds.” Jesus Christ 🤦
6 Weird, in hindsight, that I was allowed to go there because my mom was pretty strict about who I was allowed to spend time with and I guarantee that family did not meet her standards. Maybe they felt bad for Danielle and hoped I’d be a good influence? Maybe her oldest brother was a nice enough kid, who hung out with my brothers, that my mom didn’t think it could be that bad of an environment. Who knows, but I am grateful for it because it taught me to be aware of people’s home lives, but because Danielle was my friend, I learned to do it without judgment.
