It’s hard for present-me to tell how much I actually disliked women at that point. In places where I was not trying to sleep with anyone—at home with family, with my best friend of eighteen years, when talking to a professor about essays—I certainly didn’t hate women. Big Picture, most of the people I liked and felt safe around and looked up to were women. Maybe even all the people who fit that description were women. But in the everyday agony of being in a college full of rich size 0 blonde women who joined sororities and felt like they fit in there, it felt easy to hate women, or at least to blame them for what I didn’t have but desperately wanted.VI If you’re told over and over that the most you can offer a man is perky tits, a wet pussy, and no expectations, eventually anyone else who is also potentially providing that becomes competition.
* * *
Most of my guy friends came from either my freshman dorm floor or from the stand-up comedy group I was part of. The guys in the stand-up group all congregated at one house that had been dubbed Casablanca, since it was a white house.VII Casablanca was a ramshackle off-campus house that had something like fourteen bedrooms, all filled with guys. I hung out there a lot. Something was always happening at Casablanca and it almost always involved a lot of beer and a moderate amount of property destruction. Casablanca was owned by a crazy landlord, Jerry, who truly did not care if you did ANYTHING to the house.VIII Rumor had it that Casablanca was going to be torn down the next year and thus there was no reason to keep it nice. I would often come over to find two guys drunk in their underwear fighting with balustrades they’d pulled off one of the many staircases. One guy occasionally got drunk, woke up, peed directly onto his carpet, and then went back to bed. This house was vile, a caricature of an abandoned frat house from a bad comedy.
I loved it. After growing up with sisters and a brother who was nine years younger, I had never experienced unruliness like this, such worship of pure pleasure, total hedonism. Even being a spectator felt thrilling. I was off-balance the whole time I was there and, like a younger annoying sister, desperate to keep up.
Casablanca is where I first met Gator.IX We hated each other as soon as we met. More accurately, I made fun of him wearing a plaid shirt and figured that if he lived in that house and was that hot, he could take it, but instead he immediately disliked me, which is fair.X We both liked being the center of attention too much for us to ever get along amicably without one of us ceding. When I first met him, we were both dating other people long-distance, which I thought would be something we could connect over, but instead, we decided to hate each other. Anyway, about a month after we met, we both broke up with our partners the same week—I did my breakup, his girlfriend did the honors for their relationship—and that left us with a perfect patch of soil in which to sow our flirty-hatred shit. It took a little bit of time, actually, before we got to flirting. For the first bit, we just earnestly were kind of mean to each other, but funny, but still kind of mean. The few times we hung out, he would spend the night correcting everything I said, and in retaliation I would try to make fun of him publicly as much as possible, over everything from what he was wearing to what he was drinking to how he lost at beer pong. Anything and everything he did was fair game and anything and everything I said he made clear he thought was stupid.
He was—and probably still is—a hot asshole, and that was, unfortunately, exactly my type. Here’s my impression of me in my early twenties: A hot person who treats other people like shit? Okay, yes!!!! I’m going to build my entire existence around them! Despite that, I didn’t find myself initially attracted to Gator any more than to any other hot mean person.
Things changed course one night when my best, best, best friend in the world, Emilee—whom I have known since I was two years old—was visiting me at college during her school’s spring break. This was after months of Gator and I semi-playfully disliking one another. Anyway, that night Emilee and her then boyfriend were hanging out with the boys of Casablanca and me. Gator was sitting near me and kept “bothering” me—trying to take up my space on the couch, flicking condensation from his drink on me, asking for gum and then putting the wrapper in my sweatshirt pocket. You know the way sixth graders flirt? That. Well, I thought he was just being annoying, but I found it lightly pleasant because he was very hot, and hot people’s attention feels like wearing clothes right out of the dryer. I did not think it was romantic or even aimed at me because, you know, again, he was hot and he flirted with everyone. Male, female, old, young, single, taken; there were no bounds to his flirtation and almost none of it was done with any seriousness. At the end of the night, when everyone was standing around saying long goodbyes to Emilee because it was her last night and because she’s one of those people everyone loves pretty immediately, he started playing with the strings of my hoodie.XI
You have to get very close to someone to play with the strings of their hoodie. And when a group of about seven people is saying goodbye to Emilee (and a little bit to her boring then boyfriend) and you step out of the receiving line to go mess with someone’s hoodie strings, it turns out that everyone notices. EXCEPT ME. ME DID NOT NOTICE.
On the walk home, Emilee was shocked. Shocked that I didn’t find the moment noteworthy. Shocked that I dismissed this as “just the way GatorXII is.” Shocked that I didn’t already have a crush on him because, as previously stated, I’m incredibly shallow, and hot asshole is very much my type. I remember very, very clearly Emilee saying, “Sophia, he’s so into you, holy shit. He was watching you all night.” Which is exactly some shit out of a rom-com; like that exact line is in so many would-be Meg Ryan–led movies as the proof-flavored pudding that some Byronic guy loves our protagonist. I protested, and I really, really meant it at the time; I wasn’t trying to be demure or modest. I was like, “I think he’s just annoying and needs attention.” Then Boring Boyfriend chimed in to agree with Emilee: “No guy does that if he’s not into you.”
I had never, ever, ever, ever been liked by someone I actually thought I might like. I mean, my first boyfriend—Hockey Warehouse Guy—had asked me out and I was like, “Yes, okay, I would like to have sex one (1) time before I die.” I didn’t admire him or anything; I wasn’t even friends with him, really. I was used to one dynamic and one dynamic only with hot men: I want to fuck them and they do not know I exist. It was so unusual for me to not be the one trying to flirt with someone, for someone else to—appear to at least—be flirting with me. I had no idea what to do with this information. Frankly, as soon as she said that he might like me, I was like, “Ehhhh, that’s kind of a turnoff.” Anyone showing interest in me was, ironically, a real buzzkill for me. Not that it had happened often. I’m just saying, by any normal measure, I should have had no interest in Gator.
Except for one thing: Gator and I still quasi-hated each other. So of course I was hooked. All of a sudden, he had become really, really flirty with me about 30 percent of the time, and the rest of the time he was his regular very rude and very hot self. If you know anything about conditioning, it’s best to be unpredictable: that way, the subject never fully gets what’s happening and when, so they’re always on the line. And within a month of Emilee telling me that she thought he liked me, I was in trouble. All of a sudden his rudeness, his meanness, seemed like another type of flirting. You know, Jane Austen–y shit where they hate each other but they really like each other? I thought that was happening. I don’t know! We hung out almost every single day, as my friend group was his friend group, and if anything was happening, I was of course going to show up, because crush logic says hanging out around you a bunch = you falling in love with me.XIII
Because his rudeness now seemed like flirting to me, I pulled back just a little on my insults, which gave him room to do the same, so now we were hanging out constantly because I had a crush (and assumed he did too), and we were 30 percent nice to each other and 70 percent still pretty mean. Which meant we were obnoxious to be around. We had a game when walking down the street of trying to push each othe
r into bushes or trees. We would challenge each other to see how hard we could slap each other. We would compete for any chair or couch seat the other person wanted, always trying to displace one another in a weird two-person game of musical chairs. We made scenes pretty much everywhere we went. From the outside, I’m sure people felt embarrassed to witness our antics.
From the inside, things were confusing, to say the least. If I hadn’t written some of this stuff down in a journal,XIV I would have a hard time remembering or even believing it. I’ll start with the stuff that made it seem like things were going in a flirty direction: We fell asleep on the couch a lot. I sat on his lap a lot. I spent the night in his bed at least once. He grabbed my boobs at least once. He would kiss me “as a joke.”
But the flip side of this was that he was, well, an abusive friend, and not just to me. He was the most attractive member of the friend group and therefore was the de facto ruler. This seems to happen a lot in friend groups—people just do what the hottest person wants to do. Whatever he said went. If he wasn’t feeling like going out, everyone stayed in. If he wanted to go to the rugby party, we went. If he was bored of beer pong, we didn’t play. It wasn’t explicit that he was in charge or anything—the other guys often thought they were weighing in on what might happen that night—but to me, as a Not Guy, it was very obvious. He was one of those people who enjoyed crossing a line, and nothing you did or said could make him stop. The word no didn’t work for Gator. I theorize that it was because he was an extreme mama’s boy and the youngest child in his family and thus incredibly unused to hearing the word. Anyway, with this suzerainty bestowed upon him, he often chose to rain terror on people who were not as established in the group. Many times, that included me, as the only girl.
The boys once spent a whole evening throwing dried pasta at me; anytime I tried to do something else, they’d follow me out of the room. I stayed in the kitchen and waited for them to finish throwing the entire box of macaroni. They once dragged me into a closet with no lights, just me and Gator (in only his underwear), and he popped balloons to scare me.XV They threw rocks at my window, which broke the window and got glass in my bed while I was in the bed, and then got upset that I was mad. They spent a whole party throwing things down my cleavage and then inviting strangers to do the same.XVI They would often lock me out of or into my room. They once used a staircase handrail knob that fell off—we lived in a Jerry house; what can you expect?—to bang holes into my door that you could then see through. And of course, they often looked through. Gator was the instigator, the worst of them. He came up with stupid nicknames for me that he’d then tell to any guy who wasn’t him whom I was talking to—Meat Hooks, Badgersnatch, and Sturdy Sophia. He would take his pants off and jokingly “apologize” by thrusting his underwear-clad dick at me; he called it “cockpologizing.” One time I tried to share a story about working at an internship and I mentioned how I had to learn basic coding, and he and another guy cut me off midsentence to mock me, saying, “Beep boop beep boop beep beep beep boop,” for about half an hour. Anytime I tried to talk for the rest of the night, they brought it back. And I couldn’t leave because that would be “dramatic.” I didn’t talk the rest of the night. If there was ever a person willing to take a joke too far, it was Gator.
There’s more. There’s so much more, and some of it is weirder or worse and some of it is no big deal, or sounds like no big deal. And I let it all happen. Some of it I enjoyed. Some of it I ignored. Some of it I hated. Some of it I begged them to stop and they wouldn’t. Some of it felt like flirting and attention.
Looking back, it is very easy to see that this was fucked, fucked, fucked. But I wanted sooooo desperately to be chill, to be their friend, to be accepted by them. And every time I made a big deal out of a thing they did that I hated, they punished me for it. At the beginning at least, I felt like I was just in the process of learning how to be more chill. Every time I accepted their mistreatment, I thought I was just being low-maintenance. I thought I was proving myself. I thought that eventually they’d like me and accept me and maybe even care about me as a person. Which retrospectively seems like a really dumb thought to have about people treating you like shit, but which felt like a worthy goal then. Occasionally, I would explode with rage—how long can you deal with harassment before you lose it?—and then they’d call me bitchy or tell me I was overreacting and then I’d feel like shit and beat myself up for not laughing along, for not holding it together longer. On some sick, pathetic level, I was getting male attention and it seemed worth the price.
Anyway, after months of thinking that Gator might actually like me back due to all the “joke” kissing, cuddling, and even some of the insane mistreatment that seemed adjacent to flirting, I decided to ask him out sort of. I don’t know why I thought I would give him a break and do the work of being rejected; I guess I thought I owed him a lot because he was more attractive than I was? Regardless, the funny part is really that I sat in my car and the song “Brave” by Sara Bareilles came on the radio and like the absolute corniest person you’ve ever heard of, I thought, This is a sign I should ask him out. I asked him out and he basically said no, but in a wishy-washy “maybe” kind of way. Of course, I’m not an idiot—if someone says maybe when you ask them out, that’s a “FUCK NO.”
That was when I knew I needed to move on from him. Of course, I did not do that. Instead, he slept with one of my closest female friends on campus, and I got bitter and angry about that, which made things very weird in the friend group and with said female friend. I cried a lot and she and I wrote each other emotional Facebook Messenger statuses, and I was determined to be “cool” about the whole thing—a chill girl!!! But I was so hurt and pissed off that for about three or four months, every time I would get drunk—which happened a lot in college—I would lash out at him in front of everyone. I would get sad and leave parties early without telling anyone, and someone would have to go find me. One time, while walking home from a party, I decided—and my reasoning here is very unclear to me—that I needed to run to McDonald’s at full speed. In flip-flops. Also, the McDonald’s was a mile and a half away.XVII It was like I had used up all my chill trying to get him to like me and when he didn’t I became an angry little tornado.
So, I distanced myself from that friend group and went and worked on some of the other friendships I had been neglecting while I had been mooning after a total douche. PSYCH! Being the big giant dumbass I was, I thought it would be totally fine to live with Gator and the rest of his friends the very next year after that, which went pretty poorly and made us actually dislike one another rather than semi-affectedly hate each other, as we had when we first met. He graduated a semester earlier than I did and we never spoke again after seeing each other almost every day for three and a half years.
* * *
Now, I will say, because I’m a magnanimous angel, that my friendships with men in college were not all bad. I had loads of fun. Frankly, for the time and place in my life, I got a lot out of it. In many ways, I got exactly what I had always wanted: male attention. I had social capital in the spaces I wanted to be in, because being liked by men gives you extra points in the world—at least the straight cis male–dominated world of USC and, I imagine, many college campuses. When men like you it signals to other men, men you might be interested in dating, that you are acceptable. That you aren’t more trouble than you’re worth. That they aren’t going to have to tone down their jokes around you.XVIII That you aren’t going to “get mad”XIX at them—the very, very, very worst thing a woman can do to a man.
Not only do you gain male approval, but you also frequently gain some approval, if not friendship, from the other women who are doing what you’re doing, who are seeking out acceptance from guys. It’s not like everyone is actively conscious of how much they’re trying to appeal to straight cis men. We’ve all just been steeped in this shit from the beginning. We don’t even know all the ways in which we’re bending to fit the cis straight male gaze.
But when you accept that as the preeminent gaze, even subconsciously, you tend to admire (if compete with) other people who also believe the same thing, who also hold men in high regard. In many ways, making friends with straight cis guys made me feel, for the very first time in my life… normal.
There are material benefits of being a chill girl, a guys’ girl, a girl who eschews female company, unfortunately. How could appealing to the dominant group not provide advantage? But you also lose a lot. You lose the magic that is female friendship, although magic is too light and too corny a word for the reverence I feel toward female friendship. You lose the ability to separate what is right and what is popular. You lose the skill of dissenting in regard to your mistreatment. Mostly, you lose yourself. You become, in ways both large and small, a reflection of what the men around you want. Or, more often, what you think they want, what you’ve been taught—by TV, by music, by teachers, by movies, by art, by peers, by parents, by culture—to think that the men around you want. It’s an anemic version of yourself, a lacuna of personhood.
But my God do you learn a lot about Ben Affleck movies.
Everything I’ve Ever Done to Impress Men (and How Successful Each Was)I
Learned to throw a football. (It did not get me any dates.)
Got into country music for two years, including buying tickets for a country music concert. (Very successful, sadly.)
Took AP calculus instead of AP statistics because more hot guys were taking it. (Incredibly unsuccessful, except that AP calc was where I first created my Twitter, which in a way led to later romantic success, so kind of a long-game situation.)
Got really good at beer pong. (Successful: [a] I’m still above average at the game and [b] I slept with at least two people directly after winning at beer pong with them; you do the math.)
Well, This Is Exhausting Page 11
