How to be more attractive to John Smith
A man who is sexist against women is also sexist against men, because he assumes, falsely, that all or most men are likewise sexist against women.
Is this a rule? I feel like this should be a rule. At least, I have not yet seen a counter-example.
This essay on Thought Catalog, non-encouragingly titled 13 Things a Woman Can Do to be More Attractive to Men, certainly isn’t one. In fact, it should probably also be a rule that every such list should drop the “n” from “Men” and change it to “Me.”
It’s not worth bothering to take apart in its entirety, but I just want to examine one item to illustrate the sexist projection of the author, the not-at-all-pseudonymously-named-I’m-sure John Smith.
13. Stop Hoarding Guy Friends 9 out of 10 of your guy friends just want to sleep with you anyway. Men know how other men think. The first guy that comes to comfort you after a big fight will also be the first one to say “he’s not good enough for you” in order to sabotage the relationship, and then he’ll be the first one to try to get into your pants after he convinces you that your man is a creep. It’s not about having trust issues. It’s about knowing how people act. Trust is earned, not immediately granted.
He says that 9 out of 10 guy friends just want to sleep with you, which would mean that they’re not actually friends at all — just one-night-stands-in-waiting.
Which tells you two things:
- John Smith is extremely unlikely to be an actual friend to a woman, but is simply a one-night-stand-in-waiting himself, and
- John Smith assumes that every other heterosexual man on the planet is like him in this regard (statistically speaking, the 1/10 male friend could be gay).
Now, sure, plenty of male friends of women want to sleep with them. But wanting to sleep someone doesn’t disqualify most people from being able to be that person’s friend in addition to the sexual interest. Women do it all the time, gay men do it all the time, and I’m sure straight men do it all the time as well. John Smith, apparently, does not.
John Smith is probably also insanely jealous (like hell it’s “not a trust issue”), because of the aforementioned projection of his own “sex-only” motivation onto every other guy on the planet.
It’s really interesting how the same people who are most likely to apply rigid generalizations to entire other groups of people are so often just as willing to apply those same generalizations to their own group. Generalizations applied rigidly are called prejudices, and ingrained prejudices are called bigotry. John Smith’s bigotry against women, ironically, makes him bigoted against men as well.
Though he assuredly doesn’t see it that way– he thinks his belief that other guys see women in exactly the same way he does is just the Truth. His entire list would be more appropriately called 13 Things A Woman Can Do To Be More Attractive To John Smith. But then nobody would read it, because nobody gives a shit about what would make them more attractive to John Smith. And he probably knows that.
