When You're No Longer Attracted To Men But You're Not A Lesbian
There's a word for that. And it's ---
I don’t want to beg. It’s undignified. Do you really want to send me to OnlyFans to chase the foot fetishists? What am I supposed to do, put glitter on my bunions?
How about I make you laugh, you press this button, and then I pour some extra goodness into your life, and you accidentally upgrade your existence?
Eek! Don’t make me open Threads! Don’t make me! Ah, no, there I go, and… oh, it’s okay, it’s just some inspiration for this week’s post, so I can label it ‘work’.
‘Work’ is not a negative word for me. As a freelancer prone to just sliding into mmmmm, this late Spring sunshine looks delicious, it means useful productivity. Sometimes it also means I can pay for the month’s supply of cheese, or a corticosteroid injection into my glenohumeral joint to ease the pain I’ve developed from shouldering the world’s troubles (scheduled for Thursday, wish me all the luck and a decent local anaesthetic).
I spy with my both-long-and-short-sighted-astigmatic eye (screen time, screen time) a bunch of women being hilarious with words. This is what I love about men’s bad behaviour being so front-and-centre these days; the way it generates snort-your-coffee comedy.
We begin with trishaaaaa.95 (her screen name voiced by James Corden in Gavin & Stacey), saying
Here, curated for your delight, the best answers, with definitions (some by me, some by the wicked women of threads).1
Men-on-pause
(noun) A bodily response to the fetid contents of the dating pool. Hormonal shutdown provoked by the pervasive stench of misogyny, marking the end of reproductive desire.
Byesexual
(adj.) Being single for so long that you don’t even remember what it’s like to have romantic/sexual feelings.
DisappointMENt
(noun) The feeling of sadness, frustration, or dissatisfaction that occurs when a series of men fail to meet your hopes or expectations.
Nomosexual
(noun, dialect, Southern US) No mo’ sex y’all
or, to step away from neologisms
Frontal Lobe Development
A long, complex maturation process that begins in infancy and continues into a person’s early 30s. According to those who have experienced it, ‘It comes with a cat and a good vibrator.’
Clarity
A condition that seems to affect more and more women every day.
Done
That’s what it’s called. You’re done.
Yes, a lot of women are very much done with the dating/marriage/babies game. I mean, I’m happily married, have sons and some excellent male friends, and my male patrons and supporters are the best of the best, but there’s no way on earth, if I found myself single, I’d be looking for a mate.
I snapped mine up before the Manosphere got its dick out and started pissing in the dating pool. Before tender, mutually enjoyable intimate acts were deemed ‘vanilla.’ Before boys started barking at their female teachers. Before watching porn that degrades and dehumanises women became as normal as wiping your bum (and I have intel that some men now favour porn over wiping). Before young women started letting their dates give them brain damage, risking incontinence, a stroke, paralysis or death and believing it was normal, or even ‘sexy’.
There are so many threats: society-wide, if you don’t give us sex, or we’ll get violent! Oh, honey, you already are. That’s why we’re done.
And the men who wouldn’t harm us: we’re sorry, but if you want any chance to go dating again, get married, have kids, you’ve got to fix these other guys. The ones who think that we’re stupid, less-than-human, naturally subservient. We’re so done trying.
This is going to be so good for men. A chance to grow that we’ve denied them because of all we put up with, and excused. We so desperately wanted to think well of them, excuse the odd ‘bad apple.’ But the last couple of years, men (en masse) have really shown us who they are, in podcast after podcast, anti-feminist whine after whine, crime after unprosecuted crime. Stripping women of their rights over their bodies, setting sights on their right to vote.
Imagine making sex incredibly dangerous, life-alteringly, life-endingly dangerous for women, and then whining that women don’t want it.
Listen, we get it. We (most of us) like sex too. When our partners are thoughtful, considerate, hygienic, and into mutual pleasure. But it isn’t a right. It’s a nice-to-have. And as my husband and I like to say to each other, when someone’s been naughty and still expects treats, “bad baby, no biscuit.”2
For years, women kept downloading the latest software updates, getting more and more advanced, while many men, unwilling to adapt, seem stuck on version 1.0.3 And after a while, there’s such a gulf between the updated machine and the unpatched one that they can’t even talk to each other. Different operating systems. It gets so that the one that never got its software upgraded becomes genuinely dangerous to connect to: buggy crap that can crash out on you at any moment, full of viruses and trojans. And so vulnerable to malware that you should never plug it into the internet.
So, listen. Take the updates. I know it’s annoying. You have to stop what you’re doing for a bit, let the machine whir away behind a black screen, giving you no more info than “updating”, with a progress bar so static you suspect it’s gone home to put the kids to bed, make itself a cocktail and watch an episode of Fallout. But no pain, no gain, as men who definitely own a foam roller tell us.
Time to wipe the old hard drive free of every bit of old code that programmed you, as a boy, to think you were ‘better’ than girls … and all that goes with it.
We’re pretty sure you can do it, because women did. And I’ve heard tell that boys are just as capable as girls are — when they put their minds to it.
P.S. First person to say “not all men” in the comments has to send me a tenner.
Writing is my sole means of support. I know, what an idiot! It’s just the way life worked out for this iconoclastic misfit. If you love what I do, let me know in the comments, press the heart, share, upgrade, or
and I won’t tell anyone you’re a generous bugger who’s got a soft spot for ageing British eccentrics.
Crediting the sources: ‘You’re done. That’s what it’s called.’ Kaarthik Subramaniam. ‘It’s a condition that seems to affect more and more of us everyday. I think it’s called clarity.’ Lauren Beka. ‘Men-on-pause’ fennyfv . Definition my own. ‘Bye-sexual’ from zs.london. Definition supplied by Jamila Crawford. ‘Its called disappointMENt, you're welcome.’ _beansandbread. ‘Nomosexual... no mo' sex y'all.... Full disclosure I stole that from a similar post a few weeks ago’ lisa_and_pearl
I have a feeling it originated in reading The Elephant and the Bad Baby to our daughter when she was little.
Picked this up in the same Threads thread, credit to Cathryn Dolan.
For myself I am genuinely grateful to my wife for putting up with me. And I'm dull. I like reading, playing music, writing and going to bed early. My wife is an artist, as always with women artists, better than most of the male variety. The older I get the more I marvel at the twisted version of masculinity that has mutated in this century. It wasn't great to begin with, but Jesus, if you'd told me in the last century it would get this bad, I wouldn't have believed it. So, in closing, my apologies. And yes, it is a disgrace that ERA still hasn't been ratified in the US.
I’ve been saying for a while that all a woman needs in life is a dog, books, and a vibrator. And I’m past the point where I even need the vibrator.