Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

“As in …what?” I ask. “They get fat?”

“Get fat, wear sweatpants to the grocery store, et cetera. It’s generally image oriented and ties into the later complaints about withholding sex as a weapon.”

“You seem very well informed for someone who’s been studying this subject for only a morning,” Callie observes.

“I’m a quick learner,” he says, undaunted. “Anyway, the guys on this website lose their credibility early.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Too much anger, which becomes hate in a lot of instances. If you have a thesis, it should be provable on its own merits. The guys posting here don’t make a good argument for men. They end up perpetuating the stereotype they’re protesting.”

“Show us some examples of what you’re talking about with the photos,” I tell him.

“Ummm … here.”

He clicks on a thumbnail of a woman with a large, round face. A page loads, and it’s a series of three pictures. One is of the woman in a grocery store. She looks like she’s having a rough day; she’s wearing sweats, and her hair is barely brushed. She seems tired. She’s overweight but not obese. The next is a more professional photograph. The woman is smiling. She’s made up in this photo, and her hair is styled. The last is the most unflattering. She’s lying on her back in bed, sleeping. Her mouth hangs open. Her right arm is thrown to one side.

Underneath the photos is a paragraph. It reads:

“When I married this bitch twelve years ago, she was hot. Skinny, took care of herself, and was into everything in bed. We’d fuck ’til the sun came up some nights. Three years in, we had our son, and that was the end of happiness. She let herself get fat, she quit work to take care of the kid, and, worst of all, she became a whining narcissist. Sometimes I watch her sleep or eat and it’s all I can do to keep from puking. I’ve asked for a divorce, and in true bitch form, she let me know that she’s going to take me to the cleaners.

“Pretty angry,” Alan murmurs. “Let’s see another.”

Leo clicks the photo of a smiling blonde woman. The page loads. The woman is in a bikini bathing suit, standing on a beach. The sun is out, and she’s laughing. She’s in her early twenties, effortlessly beautiful, endlessly happy.

The paragraph under her photograph begins:

Inside every hot American woman is a harpy waiting to be let out. Sally and I have been together for fifteen years, married for ten of those. In the beginning, we had a great time together. I’d go so far as to say that everything was perfect. We traveled the world together, backpacked through Europe, smoked hash in Amsterdam. She was always up for adventure, and the sex was great—she was smoking hot in her twenties, and she doesn’t look too bad now. Then we finished college and got married and settled into life. She started watching feminist sitcoms that degrade men and quote empower women unquote (all that “you’ve come a long way, baby” bullshit). The changes were slow and subtle, but what it boiled down to is that she started treating me like the enemy. We fight all the time now, and we haven’t slept together in years. She accuses me of cheating constantly—even though I haven’t. When I try to defend myself, she attacks me and says that I’m full of shit, all men are scum who cheat, etc. Sometimes she cries for no reason, and it will last for days; other times she can get so rageful that it literally scares me. One time she grabbed a kitchen knife while we were fighting. I’ve tried to be the good guy again and again. I’ve tried to talk to her, but when I ask her what’s wrong, she just tells me I’m a “fucking man and would never understand what’s going on with her.” I’ve had it, and I’m going to ask for a divorce.

“Sad story,” Callie says. “Too bad he hasn’t sought out professional help.”

Deep, sudden changes in personality always have root causes. The woman this man is writing about could be bipolar and it’s just now manifesting, or she might have experienced a trauma in her life that she hasn’t revealed to him, such as a rape or an abortion or some other personal loss of magnitude. Perhaps she’s remembered something from her past that’s come back to haunt her. There’s always the possibility, of course, that he’s leaving out details and that he’s the source of her trauma.

Assuming his account is factual, this is the story of a woman in crisis, not a woman out to “destroy men.” Callie’s right. It’s tragic.

“That’s actually a fairly nice one,” Leo says. “Most of them are like the first: bitch this, bitch that, she got fat, she won’t have sex anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Bitch Stories on the menu takes you to more and much longer versions of the same.”

“We get the idea,” I say. “Let’s look at the forums.”

He navigates to the forum index page. There are three different forums to choose from: General Discussion, Man Talk , and Bitch Talk.

“I think we get the idea on Bitch Talk,” I say. “Let’s take a look at Man Talk.”

Leo clicks and the forum opens. A list of thread subjects appears. I scan them and see one called Reclaiming the Right to be a Man. “That one,” I say. The page loads.

Men today are marginalized without even knowing it. They have come to accept that they are “the brute,” “the abuser,” “the rapist,” and worse, that these qualities are inevitable and can be reversed only by women. We accept today that we do not hold the keys to our inner selves, that it is the wife or girlfriend who holds the key, and that we must listen to her as our most important teacher.

That men have been brutish in history cannot be disputed. That women have been treated poorly by men, even oppressed, cannot be disputed. But this has gone beyond a dialogue about aberrant behavior; it has instead become the accepted indictment of all men everywhere. John Bobbitt is the image held up, not Leonardo da Vinci. Ted Bundy is the example of “the lows that men can sink to;” Beethoven is not similarly held up as the “heights that men can rise to.”

Because we love our mothers, we have come to accept this image and the inherent guilt that goes with it. There are men who have never touched a woman in anger that live in fear of the possibility they might.

So let’s discuss—what are some things we can do to reverse this process in ourselves? How can we reclaim not our brutishness but our masculinity, which—current opinion aside—does not contain brutality by default as its birthright?

“This is a long thread,” Leo observes. “This first post, the one that starts the thread, is two years old. There are almost two hundred pages of replies and discussion.”

I scan down through some of those that most immediately followed this post.

One reads:

It’s hard for me to admit this, but I read your post and I cried. It was pretty unexpected. See, I’m a decent guy. I was married for ten years, and I have two children, a boy and a girl. I love them to death and I really work to be a good father. I never cheated on my wife. Yeah, I know, a lot of guys say that, but it’s really true. I had my temptations, but I never felt the pull strongly enough to actually stray.

My marriage fell apart about two years ago. I see a lot of guys on this site are pretty angry, but that’s not my scene. We fucked up the marriage mutually, and the real basis of it is that we should never have married in the first place. We weren’t marrying each other because it was what we most wanted. We married each other because it seemed like a good match. It “looked right.”

To make a long story short, I read your post and I cried because I realized the basis of making that decision was exactly what you wrote about. Cheryl was a good woman, and I needed a good woman in order to be a good man. God, what heartache I could have saved us both.