Give Me Fiction: This Is What a Male Feminist Looks Like
by Megan Koester
This story was written for Give Me Fiction, a prose reading series hosted by Ivan Hernandez. You can follow GMF on Twitter, check out the podcast on iTunes, RSS, Soundcloud, and Stitcher, and buy tickets for the live show which takes place the first Sunday of every month at San Francisco’s Lost Weekend Video. They’re skipping February, so look out for our next show in March.
His Twitter bio read, “I am become dick, the destroyer of cunts.” He had three followers. And, at this particular moment in time, he was calling a woman he did not know, nor would he ever meet, fat. Specifically, so fat that her mass rendered her un-rapeable. “ur just jealous no one would even want to rape you, tubby bitch,” he typed, in all lowercase, on a keyboard yellowed with age and overuse. As he clicked the “Tweet” button, sending his missive into the digital ether, he felt nothing.
He was not our protagonist. He did not know, nor would he ever meet, our protagonist. Most people, the subject of his vicious tweet included, ignored him—after all, he only had three followers and a tenuous at best grip on the English language. Our protagonist, however, was not “most people.” He was a social justice warrior. And he was horrified.
“You’re a Neanderthal,” our self-proclaimed activist protagonist tweeted back at the self-proclaimed cunt destroyer. In capital letters, he implored him to “EVOLVE.” The cunt destroyer, having finished his sandwich, refreshed his @ replies. “This faggot again,” he muttered as he read our protagonist’s plea.
His punctuation-less reply was as terse as it was vulgar. “shut up faggot im not talking to you,” he typed, making sure to also @ reply the woman he had insulted in his original tweet. Despite her invitation to join the conversation, she maintained silence. Our protagonist, of course, could not. He understood why she was silent—years of being abused and disenfranchised by the misogynistic power structure that made emotional violence like this socially acceptable had no doubt rendered her feeling hurt, voiceless and alone. She was too scared to speak. But he wasn’t.
“I am not, as you disgustingly referred to me, a ‘faggot,’” he typed back. “But even if I were, that would be OK. Gay people are just that—people.”
If our protagonist believed in such things as white knights, and were he to lack the humility he felt defined him, he may have considered himself a bit of an anti-authoritarian hero, the kind he self-awarely read about in dog-eared graphic novels. Straight white males like the monster he had just eviscerated on Twitter were, much to his chagrin, the watchmen of society. But who watched said watchmen? Who made them check their privilege? Step outside their comfort zones? See the world the way it really was, without being blinded by the seemingly impenetrable mask of their dominance?
Women couldn’t; the patriarchy didn’t respect them. The watchmen never listened to a word they said, even when they were screaming at the top of their lungs for equality, for dignity, for peace. Ah, but our protagonist—he listened. Their voices would never, on his watch, go ignored.
He relayed their powerful messages to the group he had resentfully found himself born into, knowing the watchmen were more inclined to listen to one of their own. He didn’t have an ulterior motive. He wasn’t trying to put the spotlight on himself—he was, after all, humble, arguably to his detriment. He wasn’t trying to get laid—he didn’t think, after all, with his dick; he thought in spite of it. He didn’t speak truth to power for self-serving reasons. He did it, simply, because it was the right thing to do.
In college, he desperately wanted to major in women’s studies; his parents, however, patently refused to continue paying his tuition were he to do so. His father didn’t “get it;” his mother was, much to his frustration, still rigidly attached to the antiquated gender roles of her youth despite the literature—Greer, de Beauvoir, Dworkin—he had sent her. He chose the more marketable field of political science, declaring, to no one in particular, that he would use his degree to change the system from the inside.
After graduation, he quickly procured a job answering the phone at a non-profit specializing in finding childcare for trans women of color who had grown up in abusive households. The phone rarely rang, leaving his days free to scan for signs of misogyny on Facebook, engage in angry yet (in his mind) civil dialogue with Twitter “trolls,” and read Iliad-length Salon think pieces.
Think pieces were, he felt, the only form of legitimate journalism we as a society had left. They were safe places where members of the groups that lived on society’s margins—women, women of color, trans women, trans women of color—finally had a voice, an audience. He liked and shared them all, attaching them to impassioned status updates in which he told his friends they, in all capital letters, NEEDED to hear the messages contained therein. As an ally to the cause, he had written a few think pieces for the Huffington Post himself—they were, by and large, responses to other think pieces he had read. For this, he received no money. But to him, it wasn’t about money. It was about creating a dialogue.
Having finished his sandwich, he refreshed his @ replies; the dialogue he had created with his cunt destroying nemesis was still going strong. “whatever,” his nemesis had typed. “you’re just some pussy-ass faggot.”
***
You can find Megan online at inoffensivecomedian.com and on Twitter @bornferal.
The Tusk 
One Response to “Give Me Fiction: This Is What a Male Feminist Looks Like”
Well written. Is this the beginning to a serialized set?