Summary: Some shit tests are unwinnable because of the double standard; learn to recognize and avoid the unhealthy women who deal these out.

Body:

I’ve been thinking a little bit about shit testing and modern feminism; and how to identify the differences between a woman who is worth some of my time and a woman who should not get any of my time and energy.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing the history of a cause even if you’re opposed to it. I know who Hitler and Hirohito were even though I’m glad that my countrymen in the United States defeated them. I know a lot about the history of feminism because Mom kept her womens’ magazines under the bathroom sink; I soaked up a little second-wave feminism because I ran across it on the way to the Maidenform ad that I was really looking for.

Second-wave feminists spent a lot of time bemoaning the double standard: it’s OK for men to work out of the home and gain money and social status by doing so, but women had to toil in the house for no money and the low status of a housewife. It’s OK for men to get a little tail on the side - secretaries and whatnot - but a housewife who slept around was labeled a slut and shunned by polite society. This is now ancient history, by the way: feminism has won this battle, the other side has been mostly defeated, to the point that Wikipedia now informs me that the Second Wave I lived through served me up a “homogenized, whitewashed chronology of feminist history.”

Be that as it may. Younger women don’t know history; they know the way things are and they feel free to shop their vaginas around without fear of opprobrium. (Any social shift in history brings with it reactionary partisans, guerilla warriors who, driven out of society, lurk in the hills and point out that the pendulum must swing back eventually; that’s us, men.)

There are remnants of the double standard still in place, though, and one of them is the absolute prohibition of male-on-female violence. You can say what you want about it, but it’s inviolate; men who initiate physical aggression towards women are automatically in the wrong, mitigating factors generally do not matter unless it is a cop shooting a black female crackhead who’s assaulting him with a deadly weapon, and even that gets a lot of negative press these days.

Which brings me to recalling a shit test I was put through a few years ago, before I knew what a shit test was. We were sitting around after dinner, relaxing and goofing, when she suddenly threw a left cross at me. Stopped about a half centimeter from my nose. If I’d leaned over or moved at that moment, she’d have broken my nose, it was a real punch.

Like anyone might, I flinched. She found this very funny; I didn’t. I’m a big ugly thug of a man, 43, have some adult gravitas, look a bit like James Gandolfini; I’m strong, and people physically fucking with me generally isn’t compatible with the frame I hold just by walking into a room. I laughed the first one off, then when she did it again I said “Stop that, I don’t like it.”

She didn’t quit. I stood up, and she kept throwing punches at me - knocked my glasses off with one of them, cutting my cheek - and kept mocking and berating me any time I flinched, laughing hysterically, saying how funny it was to see me “cringe.” She kept doing it, throwing dozens of punches.

I know how to handle this kind of behavior from a man. She was well over my personal line; I’ve started fistfights over much less than this. But this was a woman, and a woman I cared about, and a feminist; I knew damn well I could not hit her back. At the same time, I couldn’t think of what else to do. I’d never had a woman do something like this before. So I put my hands over my face and explained that this was making me feel like hitting her, that if she were a man I would already have done so, and that although I was not going to hit her, I was not sure what else to do to get her to stop. Eventually she quit, and later apologized, but I had lost a lot of frame.

If I had hit her, I believe she would have had me in jail within the hour. She may not, though; from all I’ve read on man-on-woman violence, women are generally way more accepting of it from their romantic partners than society thinks they should be. However, I myself believe in the double standard: I don’t hit women because I believe it’s the wrong thing to do. If I had hit her I would have been letting myself down. Your mileage may vary, by the way; you may think it’s OK to hit a woman, or that even though it’s not currently OK, that it ought to be made OK. I’m not here to argue with you about that. But don’t tell me that I should have hit her; it’s against my own morality to do so and a man who can’t stick by his own guns when the shit comes down isn’t even worth talking to.

Later, I was presented a lot of evidence that this woman was not good relationship material; this unwinnable shit test, and others, should have been an early clue.

Conclusion:

  • Some shit-tests can’t be passed.
  • The shit-test exists to test whether a man will display an alpha trait.
  • When a shit-test puts a man into a no-win situation, it is not a healthy shit-test from a healthy woman looking for proof; instead it is evidence of psychopathology on the woman’s part.

By the way, if this post makes it past the shitfilter, it’ll be my first one to do so. I’d be remiss if I didn’t extend my gratitude to all of you who’ve posted and discussed with me here over the last 2 years or so. You have turned my life around. I thank you; and the 20 year old HB9 who won’t take gifts from me “because it’d spoil the special thing we have going on in bed” thanks you. (I still buy her whatever Candace Swanepoel is wearing in the latest catalog, because the two of them are basically twins from the neck down; some beta traits die hard, but so far I am getting away with it.)