Fiction

Men Who Hate Women

A story about that guy who’s never wrong

Priya
Human Parts
Published in
12 min readDec 11, 2017

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Image: Sunday by Edward Hopper

He wasn’t very good with women.

Not that, you know, he had a problem. No. It was nothing like that.

Sometimes he would read articles about the kind of men who formed misogynist groups—men who had terrible body odor or perhaps a club foot, things like that — and feel a profound sense of thankfulness that he was different. No, he was a regular man, well-formed enough, just a little nervous in his interactions with women.

His first real crush was on a girl in high school — gray eyes, he remembered, and a body all the seniors talked about—and he’d suffered it quietly, not dreaming he could do anything about it. Not in high school, when he had constellations of pimples and the hint of an overbite. He’d always been intelligent, he did exceptionally well in school, but that didn’t count for much with teenage girls. He resigned himself to being sexless in high school, but he hoped things would change in adulthood; that the cliché of reinventing yourself could hold true.

It did, kind of. He grew a little taller — though he knew five feet nine inches didn’t really qualify him as tall — and he filled out some in the shoulders. The thought of going to the gym intimidated him: He couldn’t relate to the kind of men who…

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