A recent Cracked podcast has me riled up about the patriarchy again.

Right now, I am ruled up about how pop culture taught me to treat women. The fact that, as a gay man, this is all theoretical to me is immaterial. The fact is, I have this garbage in my mind, writ deep into my social programming, and it disgusts and enrages me.

The podcast in question is about consent, and all the bad juju that makes what you would think would be a dead simple issue to be fraught with peril instead.

Should there be another comma in that sentence? Whatever.

The example they give is the famous scene in Return of the Jedi where Han first kisses Leia. If you haven’t seen it in a while, here it is.

Once you put your “consent goggles” on, that scene just explodes with wrongness. Han approaches Leia, a woman with whom he has no previous romantic relationship, from behind, and she unequivocally rejects him with a freaking shoulder check to the chest. Then he grabs her hand, and slowly presses himself towards her, then kisses her.

And he gets her love that way! That’s his reward. The message is clearly that it takes a manly man like Han Solo to be confident enough to ignore consent (because silly women with their girl brains don’t know what they really want), force himself on a woman, and that’s how you get a woman.

Do I even have to explain how that leads to rape culture? AND RAPE?

Seriously. Straight men are taught that real men don’t ask permission. They just go for it. And even when a movie hero gets rejected, all he’s really risking is a slap on the face for being rude. All he’ll have to do is rub his jaw, grin, say “heh”, and then it’s game on again.

No wonder women all have awful stories of men following that script. These men were not evil and they were not sexual predators. They honestly think that this overpowering approach is how you prove to a woman that you are manly enough to be worth fucking.

After all, women like to feel pursued, right? And they don’t know what’s good for them or what they really want. So it’s up to the strong, decisive male to overcome their female dithering and give them the firm male hand they all secretly want.

Note that you have never, ever seen the reverse. You have never seen a scene where a female character pursues a male character, ignores his repeated and violent rejections of her, then kisses him and that makes him fall in love with him.

And if you put a scene like that in a movie, people would (quite paradoxically) think the guy must be gay, or at least a wimp with something very wrong with him.

And the woman in question would be seen as predatory and creepy. Well fellas, it’s the exact same thing when, in real life, you are pursuing the ladies. The kind of behaviour Han demonstrates is really not the way to go. Trust me on this one!

But the thing is, sometimes it really does work. So women have to realize their tiny part of this problem too. If you fuck a guy who acts like that, you are telling the world that yes, that is indeed the way to get the girl. Give it a shot, you might get lucky!

Also remember that a woman approaching a man is playing for far smaller stakes than a man approaching a woman. Our culture (and possibly instinct) teaches males that their entire worth as a human being rests on how hot a girl they can get , and what they can get her to do for them sexually. For a man, therefore, every time they approach a woman, their entire status is on the line.

That’s why men take it so hard sometimes. Why they get extremely angry and say crazy shit about women not thinking they are good enough because they aren’t rich rock stars with huge dicks. Sure, it seems (and is) crazy from the woman’s perspective, but there is a hell of a lot going on that most women don’t see, let alone understand.

Especially when you factor in the low status males. Men who society has very firmly and with enormous derision that they are unfuckable losers and therefore total losers. Their social status is way less than zero and they should just crawl into a hole and die.

Women have no idea what it is like to approach someone, putting your entire self-esteem on the line, only to have that person not merely reject you but act personally insulted that anyone as lowly as you ever thought you deserved to even talk to her in the first place.

And no matter how cruel her rejection is, society will not punish her for it and other women will praise her for it. In fact, other women will tell her what a bitch she is… admiringly.

Now imagine that gender flipped. A woman approaches a man, he rejects her in the cruelest possible way, acts like she’s a bug that just crawled onto his leg, and all his friends laugh and cheer him on.

It would be pretty clear that this was a horrible thing to do, right? That all the guy had to do was politely say no, and anything else was just plain mean?

And yet women get away with it all the time. It’s the sort of thing that makes men think there’s no accountability for women.

No wonder so many low-status men have decided to simply stop trying. Porn is good enough for them. Why would they keep trying to kick that football when they know Lucy is just going to snatch it away at the last second again?

And the wild thing is, women get angry when they hear that. You would think they would be glad that men they would never fuck will no longer be bothering them. But instead, they get all bent out of shape about these men and call them terrible things.

Almost like something else is going on. Like maybe women’s self-respect is based on how many men want them

But that’s a topic for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.