I don’t know about you but when I meet a medium-ugly, average man who I’m almost certain is a loser, perhaps the number one thing that will sway my opinion and make me consider that this man is worth my time is…
Are you about to say money or fame, you gold-digging whore?
No. Yes. No.
…It’s if he has a hot ex.
You know how many “he must be decent if she dated him” assumptions I’ve made? Too many. Women have become unpaid PR reps for mediocre men. Dudes who should be rotting in hell are giving our names as references and we need to normalise following up to get the full review because if you were to ask me, I’d say: 0/10. Would not eat here again.
Our girlhood is quietly betraying us. We see a stranger who’s hot, or stylish, or interesting, and assume she must have chosen well. We trust her judgement more than we trust our own opinions. We think she wouldn’t lower her standards, so we unknowingly lower our own, ignoring the red flags in the hopes of being chosen.
Nay, nay. Her taste in handbags does not translate to her taste in men, darling. Every brilliant woman I know has fucked a loser for sport. Some even married them.
It isn’t just that mediocre men get too much credit. It’s that it’s the great women that keep handing it to them.
I don’t know when it happened. Maybe it’s always been this way, but there is an alarming number of 10/10 women settling with the most bummy, loser men. And what’s worse is that once that 10/10 woman realises she’s with a bummy loser man (if she ever does reach that conclusion), she dumps him and, by her mere existence in his life once upon a time, she unintentionally validates him— meanwhile he’s telling anyone who will listen that she’s crazy.
They love that one, don’t they?
‘My ex is crazy.’
I think about my long-gone ex sometimes and how he dated a hot girl after me. I think about how I did that girl so dirty because I know my existence gave him validity. He spoke about me early on, she stalked my profile (if he didn’t shove it down her throat on day one) and she thought: oh, if he’s good enough for her there must be something to this guy with no friends, awful teeth and an inexplicable darkness I’m yet to uncover.
Baby girl, no. I was lonely, bored, catastrophically stupid, and literally blind drunk the entire time. My involvement was not a stamp of value. It was a cry for help.
And it gets worse.
That girl reached out to me after their breakup and I heard it straight from her lips that he had a hell of a lot to say about me.
Obviously.
But when he called me crazy, she believed him. And then he did the same vile things to her that he’d done to me.
I’m in no way blaming that girl for wanting to believe him, by the way. Because I’ve done it too. We all do it.
Our internalised misogyny is constantly betraying us and in ways so insidious, we can’t even see it. We don’t just inherit misogyny from men. We inherit it from culture, from media, from our mothers. And then we use it on each other.
Women follow women everywhere except where it matters most, and men bank on that.
Because why is it we trust another woman’s taste in shoes but we are so quick to believe a man over her when the opportunity presents itself to tear her down? We will follow her to a £40 pilates class and we’ll date a loser guy just because she dated him but god forbid we believe her over that man. He gets to walk around wearing his hot ex like social status merch all while simultaneously stripping her of her agency.
She validates him yet she’s invalid.
GIRLS, just a PSA: First of all, it should be a huge red flag when a man speaks in a certain way about an ex. Let’s start there. But if he calls any woman crazy, please run a fucking mile. You should know by now that it’s more than probable that that particular man did something unforgivable and, god forbid, she reacted and called him out. It’s most likely an effort to ruin the validity of whatever claims she might make about him and excuse his bad behaviour by calling her sanity into question.
Nice try, fuck face.
If a woman calls a man crazy, it’s probable she narrowly escaped within an inch of her life. When a man calls a woman crazy, it’s most likely because he’s an asshole.
We really should normalise calling up ex girlfriends and asking for a character reference anytime we meet a man— and then we should trust her when she says he’s dog shit.
Is there an app for leaving a review for men? If there isn’t, I’m about to go into my tech startup, women-in-STEM era and develop one.
If we want a cultural shift, the uprising isn’t just not dating losers. We need to collectively raise the bar for men.
I am always so grossly disappointed when I see the most talented, smart and beautiful women with an absolute bum of a man. An actual stain on humanity who treats her like shit and looks like he just crawled out of a hole. I see this more often than not and it totally baffles me. Are these really the men that we have left? I know it’s slim pickins out here but we need to wake up and smell the shit, ladies.
It breaks my heart watching my friends pining over a guy who is quite literally her biggest op and probably can’t even keep his own asshole clean. It boils my fucking blood, actually.
The bar that has been set for men is in hell. We gush over a man if he possesses half the empathy or emotional maturity of the average woman and we brand him a good guy when he doesn’t emotionally or physically abuse us.
The world feels like it is drowning in gorgeous, self-made, emotionally literate women… and the same women are stuck picking from a pond of undercooked men.
I think it’s time we admit that the world would transform overnight if we simply raised our standards to the same level as our skincare. We need to collectively remember our worth. We hold ourselves to impossible standards in every area of our lives, then bulldoze all of it with our taste in men.
Hot girls must unionise. No more endorsements via proximity. No more references. No more losers.
If we all collectively rejected bummy men the world would be a better place. The economy would stabilise. Innovation would spike. Half the male population would either rise or wither. The abusers, losers, and bums alike would all be cast out of society’s bloodstream.
There isn’t a male loneliness epidemic. There is a male loser epidemic.
Women don’t need a man’s signature to open a bank account anymore. We are in the workforce, we are financially free and we are independent. Which means we are marrying solely for love and personality, only to realise that we’d rather stay single than deal with the headache.
Every time a brilliant woman ends up with a loser, an angel somewhere loses its wings.
And before anyone comes at me about my comments on the male loneliness epidemic, there is a wide systemic issue here rooted in patriarchy and misogyny. There is a reason we’d choose the bear. This is not a female issue. It’s a societal issue. Do fucking better.
But I digress. More on that another time. I need a nap.
See you next time in the confessional,
Blithe x
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