Breakfast with American Psycho

If they have a good linkedin profile, they’re just like a girl from a conservative family who’s paranoid about whether or not her secret bf has parked far enough from the family home to pick her up.

Femcel pt. 1

Breakfast with American well-off guy. Well-off guys with great jobs are actually safer to deal with than we think. More money, more power, so more dangerous ? Not really. The money and power is landed to them. If they have a good linkedin profile, they’re just like a girl from a conservative family who’s paranoid about whether or not her secret boyfriend has parked far enough from the family home to pick her up. The family, the church, the father, is now the company that employs them. Now, we can both get each other in trouble.

Of course, things stay rigged. I was more scared than him, he was more powerful than me. It was not his first rodeo. I, I was still contemplating how vertiginous it is to be on the back of a horse .

He told me about his life, his marriage that he called off, his job, his trips, I listened, talked about myself a little, but kept it short. Men do love when they’re listened to. I didn’t mind. It was actually my favourite thing about this whole encounter. I like listening to people’s stories. How they perceive themselves, how they go about things, the choices they make, what they like, what they’re worried about. In a nice place too, with fancy buffet food. My daddy issues got triggered, breakfast at a hotel reminded me of family vacations in all-inclusive hotels, where your dad’s face is all unusually puffy because he got enough sleep for once, but also he woke all of us up at 8:00 so we get a good spot at the hotel’s breakfast area.

But now, it wasn’t my dad, and I wasn’t a pre-teen who wasn’t going to swim much because of my muffin top and my mom didn’t let me get a full body-wax, and it hurts too much anyway. Years later, it was me, with the right skinny body, lasered, and there’s this guy, who had just put his penis in my mouth and came on my stomach 7 minutes earlier. I felt both out of place, and perfectly adequate. Out of place because it felt like people could see it, by just looking at the both of us; there was something off, I wasn’t supposed to be there, or, not with him. Perfectly adequate, in comparison to what had just happened; it was weird and wrong, but now, it’s over and I was just having breakfast with a man who looks comfortable having breakfast with me. We looked like we were used to each other.

Not like lovers; he didn’t hold my hand or wrap his around my waist or anything of the sort, it rather felt like we were two old colleagues. Of course, he was the one to install this ‘chill’ rapport; internally, I wasn’t as comfortable as him or as I must’ve looked. I was improvising, deep in unknown territory, and it somewhat felt like trying on a piece of clothing I usually never wear, and it actually looks ok, but I still feel weird. A stranger wouldn’t think it’s weird but friends or family would say something like: “Wow ! Quite unusual knowing you !” And then I wouldn’t know whether it’s condescending, or shaming, or just surprise they didn’t know how to express without making me feel inadequate, so I’d just giggle but I’d also feel terrible and I’d want to hide, and then I’d feel terrible for feeling terrible because “why am I overanalysing this, it’s not even that deep”, but also I feel like I look like a clown with this thing on, and now I just want to take it off.

We went up again, and he told me he needed to sleep and that he was going to have to walk me out. I don’t remember how he said it. People like him know how to say these things. I don’t even know how to memorise them when they’re said to me. Sometimes it feels like that’s precisely the difference between people like me and people like him. They know how to talk so that what they do and what they have you do seems like a harmonious and fair choreography. Words that alienate both of you from your ability to assign morality to gestures, choices, and actions. Yours and theirs. Like a vacuum of decorum where you both become deaf to right and wrong, mean and kind, considerate and apathetic.

I asked him to pick me up before I leave. I wanted to be picked up. He did it, and then kissed me. I didn’t want that. But did it anyway; he had picked me up, so.

He took the lifts again with me and walked with me until we got to the main door. We said bye to each other, and I went to the closest pharmacy. I bought a plan-B. Because I had not demanded protection this time either. It was going to cover both encounters as they were less than 5 days apart. Amphetamines, antidepressants, beta-blockers, Plan B. Big pharma and dating apps, to deliver touch-starved/low-self esteem girls to your hotel for free. The culture reproduces people like me, and people like this guy. Cynically enough, we were made for each other; not in the way Perrault wrote, that’s just part of the wider story, the one where I grow up lacking love and being taught that for a girl like me, nothing can heal me and make me happier than a handsome man’s sustained attention.

In her song Born to Die, Lana Del Rey asked : “Is it by mistake or design ?” Well, look at how desire and money, pain and pleasure, pride and humiliation, cum and tears run and leak in and out of us, along the same lines, writing the same stories, again and again. We’re automata.

I was too medicated to feel or rationalise what I had lived in this way. My plan B in my mouth and a Redbull zero to wash it down, I pulled out my phone and sent audios to my best-friend from highschool to tell how great this encounter had been. I was excited. Probably only because of how much better it was than last weekend’s. Probably because my bar has always been in hell.

But even this delusional and artificial euphoria was short lived. When I got home, I decided to text him some more. At some point he let me know a bit more explicitly that I was a hook-up, and that he needed to get his day started. The thin, see-through dexedrine-laced veil covering the ugliness of reality instantly disintegrated and all the disgust, the emptiness, the hole, the sadness filled my body all at once, and spilled over; I cried all the tears a body needs to put itself to sleep on a sunny Saturday at 11 am.

The next few days were spent doing research on how Plan B affects your body. Did you know one Plan B pill is equivalent to like 5 birth control pills taken at the same time ? And that birth control is useless if you’re past the ovulation phase of your cycle ?

I texted the guy some more and found out about his insanity. During the following days, I think he realised he could get way more use from me than he had originally planned. He understood I was affection starved and I could see these realisations stealthily translate into attempts to soften his language, in a lazy attempt to emotionally entrap me of course. It was insane to see how predatory someone can get, when they realise they’re dealing with someone who’s “new to a game”, but then they often mess it up because they’re incapable of staying within the limits of what’s achievable in terms of benefits. They get greedy, they go too far and it becomes grotesque, and at that point, even the most naive victim runs away. Evil fail. You’re evil but you don’t even know how to evil. But it doesn’t make you good. You failed at that too. In the medieval times, they’d throw tomatoes at people like this.

He told me things like “you should try fucking a girl, they’re more on the side of cuddling and such”, which I could tell, based on a few things he’d told me before that, that he only said it to plant a seed, so that eventually he could talk me into having a threesome with him. He then told me about swallowing cum and how his ex-girlfriend “learned” to enjoy it, and that I too can “learn to enjoy things”. And then Nobel prize of the most deranged thing I or even you, reader, will ever hear in your life, he suggested to get me pregnant, because one, it would be fun to make me go through the changes that pregnancy involves, and two he wants kids and “needs someone to do that with”.

What was sordid about this wasn’t necessarily that he had seriously suggested these things to me. It was how normal and cordial he was otherwise. It was also the fact that I knew he wouldn’t have talked about any of it unless he knew there were chances that I might go along with it. That’s what scared me. That he thought I was that naive, that lonely, that ignorant. What did he see in me that was broken to the point he thought I’d go along with something like this. Or was he just really naive himself ? To think I’d be this ignorant about my own safety, dignity and interests just because I was a virgin, or just because I had not received much attention or affection from men in my life ?

He was almost right, because I acted like all of this wasn’t as insane as it really was and we kept texting, sporadically. One day he told me I shouldn’t be talking about periods to him because it was going to result in me becoming unattractive to him. But one day, mid-conversation, I blocked him out of the blue and never contacted him again. Thank you for teaching me about how malevolence, exploitation, abuse can reside in the most mundane places. It can be absurd and nonsensical. We always think it only comes with a long and thick plot, and needs your involvement, much more time and context and many reasons and emotions. It doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a polite suggestion slipped in a casual conversation. Sometimes it looks like a fun thing you might like. Like something his ex-girlfriends really loves to do, or whatever the fuck. It felt great to block him. Block ! Go to hell. No explanation, keep wondering. Ask yourself questions, it seems like no one gave you the opportunity to do so in a while. And let me stroke my ego with this, like you stroked your cock on my body. An illusion of being even is better than the emptiness you left me in.

A few days later, I matched with another guy: academic, in his late thirties. I had not realised at the time that I was going too fast, that there was something wrong with it all. I thought I was getting ahead. Dating apps are gamified, and meeting these people at this rate felt like I had gained agency, compared to the months-long period during which I’d desperately wait for the uninterested replies of an uninteresting guy who wouldn’t care if a vehicle full of TNT drove towards me at full speed.

tbc.

Femcel pt. 10