I thought about how men tried to “warn” us about other men. Those men who warn us could be our male friends, brothers, father, co-workers, “nice guy” who secretly tries to get with us while pretending to be friends, etc.

But there’s one thing they all share in common. They don’t give intimate information and tell tale signs of male depravity and how to fend for ourselves. When something happens to us, they call us all kinds of stupid and look at us like we are tainted like it’s our fault, not the asshole dude who took an advantage of us.

We get two types of warnings that serve no benefit to us:

  1. Don’t talk to any man because they are bad!!!!1!1!!! They leave us in the dark on the details. We are not in the locker room with you and your buddies, so don’t expect us to understand male depravity. They’d rather have us rot in the house hiding from the world just to be “safe”. This kind of warning is often from our brothers and/or fathers. Even our male relatives. Some male friends apply here too. They see us as the extension of their honour and ego. They don’t really care about us. Some of them lose respect for us if something bad happens to us. They are misogynistic and most likely treat other women like that. They are basically warning us of the men like themselves or guys that they hang out with and are supposedly “cool” with. They don’t care about their friends hurting other women because they are not their sisters, moms, etc and because of bro code!1!1!1! That’s their logic. They don’t have integrity nor morals. Sis, they are telling on themselves.

  2. There is other kind of warning that benefits to certain type of men, not us. Those certain type of men are “nice guys” who want us while pretending to be our friends. They would tell us to give ugly guys a chance and stop dating good looking assholes because they are looking out for us and would give us love and respect that we deserve. We were too naive to know that there are literally no difference between good looking assholes and ugly “nice guys”. They are both assholes. The difference is that the “nice guys” are delusional into thinking that they are not assholes and gaslight us to think the same.

Media is no help. Media doesn’t help us understand the male depravity and help us build our self-worth. Instead they gaslight us to lower our standards and put up with a low-effort, bumbling asshole like all the guys you see in romcoms and sitcoms. Media keeps us distracted and fixated on our looks as if it’s tied to self-worth while men could go on having the best life while being mediocre and looking average as hell.

What I mean by mediocre is that they don’t try their best in all areas of their lives like putting in effort in their relationships, jobs, etc and they are entitled to have high effort from others, especially women.

The best resources such as Lundy Bancroft’s book “Why does he do that?”, and other similar books give detailed information on how to avoid abusive men. That’s what could have helped us in our early dating years. Not useless and ego-driven warnings that men in our lives gave to us. Too bad those books are not very well-known.

There is no wonder why almost all of us have been pickmes at some point in our lives. We get zero resources on how not to be pickme. We were trained to be pickme from media, peers, our upbringing and culture. I don’t blame women for being one. We all must unlearn it in order to have a major cultural shift.

This is why FDS is so, so important. It contains rich resources and great community of strong and wise women who uplift each other. We need FDS or else it’s hard to fend off the constant gaslighting from the world when we are on our own without FDS support.