Dear Men, It’s Time We Had A Conversation

Gather around, those who identify as menly mens.

We need to have a talk.

A number of of you are doing some things very badly. You’ve gone awry, you poor fools.

(And already I know there’s some suppurating human blister out there about to hop on social media and call me Cuck Wendig, but trust me, if “cuck” is your go-to-insult of choice, we all know you’re a greasy, blubbering shit-baby who still lives with his parents.)

Let’s highlight some areas of improvement, gents. Because you’re getting to be a problem.

What Did You Do To The Restroom, You Animal

Merciful Jesus, what the fuck did you do to that public restroom?

I go into the rooms where men are supposed to take out the biological garbage, and fucking god how are we fucking this up? There is piss everywhere. How is that happening? Are you whizzing into the Dyson Airblade with the hopes of misting the entire room with your urine? At each urinal, there is a small pond — nay, a lake — of pee underneath. I go to the airport restroom with the express purpose of sterilizing my suitcase’s caster wheels in the collective urine of a thousand men. Urinals aren’t thimbles. It’s not a difficult carnival game. Each urinal is very generously sized for the meager stream of Mountain Dew that will exit your body. Point yourself at the welcoming porcelain and hold steady. How is that much urine getting outside the urinal? I’ve literally seen urine on top of urinals. As if you thought the goal was to hit the wall and then drizzle it downwards into the urinal’s mouth. (I’ve also seen poop in a urinal. Which, y’know, I guess I’m happy it was in it and not outside of it.)

I once, while waiting for a urinal, watched a guy piss all over his own shoes because — and this is just a guess — he was afraid to look down at his own dong or accidentally grab a glimpse of a neighboring dong. Instilled with sheer dick fear, he chose instead to just wee all over his feet instead of casting his gaze south to see how the whole “peeing in a urinal” business was going.

Don’t even think about looking in the stalls. The stalls are practically sweating with urine.

Then there’s the sink area. Oh my god, that’s wet, too. Moistness, moistness, everywhere. Granted, some bathrooms suffer from poor design (WASH HANDS HERE, WALK 100 YARDS TO A TOWEL DISPENSER THAT DOESN’T WORK), but even still, why is everything so wet? Are we in that much of a hurry? If we could collect all the wasted water in a men’s restroom, we could save California from drying up and going full dustbowl.

Men, get better. Control yourself in the bathroom. Fix your business.

Enough With The Fucking Cologne

Ye Gods, some of you smell. And not in the way where it’s like you’ve been digging ditches in a hot swamp. No, the odor is like you took a shower underneath a nozzle that dispenses only CK-1. You smell like bug spray and fraternity hazing. You stink like you just took a dunk in the same tank of noxious chemicals that birthed the Joker.

Listen, I get it, you think, UGH, MY MALODOROUS SWEAT, and guys are sort of inundated early on with this sense that we’re not supposed to have any kind of smell beyond that which we choose to apply to our bodies. Puberty hits and suddenly it’s like, HEY NOW YOU LEAK AND STINK, SO HURRY UP AND ELIMINATE YOUR NASTY HUMAN MIASMA LEST THE WORLD RECOGNIZE YOU FOR THE NERVOUS, OOZING PIG THAT YOU ARE. And we have a wide range of deodorants and anti-perspirants and colognes and shampoos and other pesticidal stench-fighting unguents to help us combat that human miasma.

But here’s the thing.

First, your sweat probably smells better than you’ve been told. Okay, it’s one thing if you’ve been pickling in your own manbrine with no interest in actually showering. But as long as it hasn’t been a protracted amount of time, you probably smell, well, normal.

Second, if you do wish to apply some kind of chemical scent to your body, more power to you. Just don’t use an amount equivalent to what it would take to drown a human toddler. A mist here, a spritz there, okay. Fsst, fsst, psshhh, done. Stop there. Put down the can, the tube, the mister, the hose, and walk the fuck away. If you’re going through more than one bottle of cologne every, say, ten years, you’re almost certainly overdoing it.

Third, soap is actually a nice smell. Just soap. Regular soap. A little bit of it. Soap.

I was at the beach this summer, and so many men there who gave off a mephitic, eye-blistering wave of horror — this corpse-sweet frat-boy rape-culture Windex smell that summarily overtook the normal beach smells of sand, salt, suntan lotion. And they were at breakfast, too — you’d try to take a bite of sausage and with it you’d inhale a mouthful of Axe Body Spray so thick it had weight and texture. A stink you can chew.

Just, god, fuck, stop punishing yourself and the rest of us us with your unholy sheen of venom. Wash your body from time to time. Use soap. That’s it. Cool it with the nerve toxins, you’re killing birds and frogs and other nearby wildlife.

Go To The Doctor Already

Men don’t like to go to the doctor.

It’s some combination of I WAS TOLD THAT TOUGH GUYS DON’T GO TO THE DOCTOR I CAN FIX IT MYSELF and ALSO SECRETLY I’M AFRAID TO GO AND I DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO SEE THAT I’M AFRAID SO INSTEAD I’LL JUST PRETEND I’M MISTER BULLETPROOF. Add in the fact that the occasional doctor’s visit requires the doctor to:

a) handle your privates, whatever they may be

b) stick a finger or probing device up your no-no-hole

And suddenly guys are all stoic and cocky about it, until of course their prostate swells up to the size of a cantaloupe — but ha ha, at least nobody ever shoved a finger up your butt, big guy.

Seriously. Get your shit checked out. Go to the doctor. Get your health dealt with, you coward. Your manliness is not in danger. Your manliness has nothing to do with it. Your manliness isn’t even a thing. Be a person who gives a shit about themselves and about the people around them and get your business handled. I got my prostate checked out by a big-fingered doc who said my sphincter had “nice snap.” It was not my most dignified moment but the silver lining was, hey, I don’t have prostate cancer and also, I will accept any compliments about my sphincter, that’s fine, that’s very nice, thank you, large-knuckled doctor. Don’t be Mister Tough Guy who dies because he’s too tough or because he’s homophobic.

You Can’t Fix Everything

Put. That toolbox. Down.

Toolboxes are for closers only.

You can’t always fix that thing you think you can fix. And that’s okay! I can hang a shelf. I can maybe replace a ceiling fan or a light fixture. But good goddamn, you have to know your limits. Buying a house becomes an exercise of, HEY, I WONDER WHAT JOE-BRO OWNER “FIXED” WHEN HE OWNED THE HOUSE LAST. You get an actual repairman in there and they open the walls and suddenly it’s all, “The last owner tried fixing everything with duct tape and lamp-cord. This pipe over here is just a Pringles can and chewing gum. You were about ten minutes from everything exploding.” I recognize the need to be frugal, and I also recognize that it is perfectly wise to try to develop the skill-sets necessary to perform certain kinds of repairs within a certain purview. But you know, sometimes you have to call in the expert. They’re the ones who can save you from spending more money to fix the thing you just fucked up when trying to fix the thing. They’re the ones who can prevent you from injuring yourself or from burning your dumb house down because your Amateur Hour Electrician status jolly well won’t cut it.

To repeat: KNOW YOUR LIMITS. You can’t fix everything. And you don’t have to. We need to as men stop judging other men who aren’t handy with tools or who can’t fix every last machine in the house. (My wife is actually the one who fixes shit, for the record. I do the cooking, and she does the home repair. I have no problems with this arrangement.)

Hitting On Women, Catcalling, And Other Shitty Shittiness

*sighs*

*pinches bridge of nose*

I once watched a guy try to hit on a blind woman in a grocery store.

It was gross.

Yesterday, an article went boomeranging around social media from a PUA MRA knob (some fuck-man named “Dan Bacon,” if you can believe that, god help us), and this ‘article’ was about how to properly engage (read: “hit on”) a woman who is wearing headphones. Which is asinine because of course a woman has headphones on because she doesn’t want to talk to you — either actively or passively, it doesn’t matter. She’s busy. She doesn’t need or want your shit up in her shit. I said on Twitter that the best way to talk to a woman wearing headphones is:

a) punch yourself in the face

b) when she looks up and removes her headphones, apologize for thinking she owes you her time

I would then add c) run home and stare at your bloody face in the mirror and think about what you’ve done, you belligerent cankermonkey, and also be thankful she did not open her mouth and consume you in a howling vortex of spiders.

Women don’t owe you anything. They don’t owe you a smile. They don’t owe you kindness. They don’t owe you a single moment of their time, much less any kind of romantic or sexual gratification. They aren’t animals who temporarily escaped their fence and it’s your job to convince them with cooing noises or a cracking whip to come back to their stable. Don’t catcall them. Don’t hit on them. Don’t touch them if they don’t ask to be touched. Get enthusiastic consent in every possible interaction. They have power equal to yours. Yours does not eclipse theirs. Your manliness is so not a thing.

We have these outmoded ideas of manliness that replace confidence with aggressiveness, that exchanges basic human strength of character with dominance and ownership. Get shut of all that. Your idea of masculinity is brittle, over-worked steel — it is fragile because it simply cannot support itself. It’s toxic because it’s off-gassing centuries worth of bad ideas about how men must conquer and compete and control. You need to do better. You need to be better. You need to stop giving the rest of us a bad name, damnit. Stop giving into the bullshit.

P.S. nobody wants unsolicited dick pics

P.P.S. seriously the dick is the least-most interesting thing about you and probably the least-most interesting thing in the whole world, put that thing away, you’re upsetting everybody