Hating Men Keeps Me Alive

Hypervigilance Isn’t Paranoia, it's survival

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Happy new year! Even if it is February. This post has been in my draft for a long time now. I haven't posted it because I've been scared, worried that I was too extreme… I've been thinking of ways to make myself more palatable. Tsk. Tsk. But not anymore. My dear friend gave me the courage to post this so I hope you like it. I wish you didn't have to relate to it because it's not something that's nice but it is real.

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I realized a while ago that I hate men. I don't trust them and I can't stand them. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks. It was hard for me to come to terms with it. I'm not a hateful person;

I'm rather sweet.

But somehow when I see a man on the road, I wonder how many women he has murdered or raped. I don't remember the first time it happened or even how it started. All I know is that it has been happening.

I'm tired of acting like I'm not casually calling random men I see killers and rapists. Sometimes I'll see a man I'm acquainted with walking down the street and my first thought would be "he looks like he could strangle his wife," or I'd hear a man talk in church and in my head I'd think "this one probably beats his wife at home." This was my first indication of my burgeoning hatred for men.

The second indication was my sudden distrust for the men in my life. I would hear my boyfriend's voice and imagine him killing me. My boyfriend and I are long distance and at the time of writing this have never met in real life. He suggested meeting at a hotel and somehow my life flashed before my eyes and all I could see was my corpse. I could already see the headlines: "Naive girlfriend gets murdered by boyfriend after meeting him for the first time in a hotel." I could imagine the comments from useless Nigerians: "How could she meet him in a hotel?" "Why would she date a man she has never seen?" "She was probably a runs girl, meeting a man in a hotel." My boyfriend is a sweet teddy bear, but I wouldn't want to be left alone in the woods with him.

Not only did I distrust my boyfriend but even men that had been in my life for much longer, like my guy best friend. I love him to pieces but I'm sometimes still reminded of the fact that he's only just a man. And that he will say something that reeks of male privilege. It is inevitable.

Something like how "it's not all men." My boyfriend and best friend are progressive men, yet...

When it comes to the men in my family, I see them with mixed reactions. There are some I wouldn't trust with my corpse and some I wouldn't trust period. And there are some I trust, like my brothers and dad, but I'm constantly disappointed by their words. I love them, but that doesn't take away from their patriarchal thinking.

I can't expect that just because they have a woman in their life they will suddenly start to see the rest of us differently. The day my younger brother said most women only got to where they are because they "sucked and fucked," a part of me broke. Again I was reminded that omo, he's just a guy—don't put him on a pedestal.

And so I realized if I can't trust the men in my life, the men I know and love, then who can I trust? If I can't trust random "nice," "kind" men—because it may turn out they see me as a sex object or as a piece of meat to be cut up—then who can I trust? For every girl, woman that is beaten up, killed, abused, raped, molested by a man, the part of my heart capable of loving men breaks. And the pieces turn to stone. For every death, a part of me shrivels and dies.

I have never given myself an opportunity to evaluate and analyze critically these thoughts and feelings; rather, I pushed them away to seem more palatable to men so that they can like me and want to date me. Which is ironic seeing as I hate them.

My hatred didn't appear in a vacuum. It's a series of events, each one more horrific than the last.

Today, we hear that a woman was killed by her husband. Tomorrow, a sister, raped by her brother. The day after that, a child molested by her grandfather.

These women thought they could trust the men in their lives. They loved them, cared for them, adored them—and what did they get in return? A total, utter destruction of their lives. What's to say that I'm not next? How do I separate the men in front of me from the systems that keep letting men like them off the hook? My distrust is not personal, it's structural.

I can't ignore it any longer: I hate men and I don't know how to handle it.

I can't handle the constant hypervigilance. Wondering if I'm next. Wondering if the men in my life actually love me or if they're thinking about how to butcher me and hide my body.

I can't remember the last time I felt truly safe among a group of men.

And the worst part is nobody cares. To the world, I'm just another paranoid woman, a feminist who "hates men," when all I'm doing is trying to survive.