by Don Hall

I hear you, sitting in your room, typing furiously away about how lonely you are and how angry it makes you that, for some unexplained reason, women don’t find you companionable.

I mean, instead of looking hard at yourself and your behavior, your borderline social retardation, your obsessive compulsive mania, it’s just easier to find someone else to blame.

A long time ago, a friend and colleague of mine was accused by a group of women we both worked with of being sexually inappropriate. He had been previously fired by another company for the same thing and was caught in a web of outrage and hurt and fury at the women who had him fired before and now the women he was being called out by at present.

We had lunch. I told him that the longer than comfortable hugs, the spontaneous but unrequested shoulder rubs, the slightly sexual jokes, and his basic inability to listen to women when they spoke amounted to a general creepiness he exuded. He was angry at the unfairness of it. He wept in frustration.

The choice was simple, I told him. Determine that the cause of his exile by the opposite sex was not their fault nor the fault of women in general but his fault or continue to see fault in every woman he encounters, slowly building up a completely unreasonable set of negative expectations about both himself and an entire gender.

So, as you sit in front of your iPad searching porn and pricing out Japanese sex robots (I hear they’re deeply discounted used) you have a choice as well.

Anger and frustration, self delusion and denial are not, in any way, sexy. Desperation and fury are not awesome qualities to put on your OKCupid profile. In fact, my guess is that smokers get more play than the guy who signals his sad, lonely, outrage for all to swipe away. And those who admit to smoking get no play, my friend.

A couple of friendly tips because I know that once you open your mouth about these festering thoughts about the injustice of having to jack off to pregnancy porn each night instead of having a live woman at your beck and call, the vitriol you receive is just more fuel for your impotence.

Have you heard the term “Loser Snob”? Maybe not because I made up the term (or as Belknap would write “FUN FACT: I coined the term “Loser Snob.”) A loser snob is someone who is of average looks but only seeks to date those who are of above average. You are that snob. You’re not bad looking but you aren’t Brad Pitt, either. A bit overweight, thinning hair, your teeth aren’t the bright white of a Hollywood star. Not a toad but not a prince. If you only focus your masculine attentions on women who look like the stars of your favorite PornHub channel and turn your nose up at women who, like you, are merely average looking, you are both a loser AND a loser snob.

Loser snobs are lonely, angry bastards. Don’t be a loser snob.

Second, and more importantly, women are people. Humans. The same as you. You don’t owe anyone anything, right? Neither does any woman you meet or stalk online. Exactly like you. Before you declare that they are all crazy and need therapy, take your own advice and see a therapist yourself. 

I repeat: women are people. Which by definition means that, yes, some of them are assholes. Some of them of batshit crazy, narcissistic, opportunistic stains just like all humans. It also means that some of them are super heroic badasses with hearts of gold. And the rest are somewhere in between.

I’ve been mugged three times in my life. All three times I was mugged by either one or three black men. Following that series of experiences, is it reasonable to then associate being mugged with black men? Of course but it isn’t rational. On the same note, I’ve been helped out at least three times in my life — financially or just a genuinely strong shoulder to lean on — by black men. Is it reasonable to associate being assisted with black men? Yes but it isn’t rational. As much as the Social Media Paradigm requires the wholesale labeling of one another into tribes, it is the beauty of individualism that forces us to recognize that people are people and not monoliths of ideology and culture.

Thus, your bad experience with a woman in high school and that really awful experience post-college that caused you to have to sit with Human Resources cannot paint the all-encompassing picture of women you’ve chosen to carry in your beat up, 80s rock, duct-taped wallet.

As a man in your fifties, it is your job to provide a role model for all the twenty-year old dudes who, like you in those halcyon days, thought you had it all figured out. In the parlance of better societies, you are an Elder and the responsibility is to a greater good than your pathetic self interest and rage-fueled bias.

The real question you need to ask yourself is: Am I the man I thought I could be? How do I become him?