Men, Get Your Shit Together

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this website calling women out for their bad behavior.

I’ve written about dating, relationships, workplace bullshit, social media, double standards, and plenty of other situations where women sometimes get away with things that men would be crucified for doing. Some of those articles have inevitably resulted in women getting pissed at me, which is fine. If you’re going to write opinion pieces called The Angry Jerk, occasionally making people angry is sort of part of the job description.

But fair is fair.

Women certainly don’t have a monopoly on shitty behavior, and some of my fellow guys could really stand to get their shit together. I’m not talking about every man on Earth, obviously. Just like when I complain about women doing something stupid, I’m not suggesting every woman does it. If you’re a normal, reasonably well-adjusted guy who knows how to behave like an adult, congratulations, this article probably isn’t about you.

The rest of you might want to pay attention.

One thing I’ve heard plenty of guys say over the years is that they’d rather work with men because women bring too much drama into the workplace. Put a group of women together and eventually there’s gossiping, passive-aggressive bullshit, backstabbing, cliques, and people secretly hating each other while smiling to each other’s faces.

There’s definitely some truth to that.

The problem is that a workplace full of men isn’t necessarily any better.

I spent a few years working a shop job in medical manufacturing where, aside from a handful of women, almost everybody working on the production floor was male. You’d think we were all sitting around discussing football, drinking motor oil, and bonding through our shared masculinity or whatever the fuck men are supposed to do when women aren’t around.

Nope.

Those guys gossiped like a bunch of bored housewives.

Everybody knew everybody else’s business. Guys were constantly talking shit about each other behind their backs, complaining about stupid things, keeping tabs on what everybody else was doing, and ratting each other out for sport. You’d have two guys standing there laughing together like best friends, then one of them would walk away and the other would immediately start telling you what an asshole he was.

The shop also had an impressive collection of grown men who apparently never learned how to control their emotions. You had to carefully gauge people’s moods before talking to them because some of these guys could be set off by practically anything. Look at someone the wrong way, question something they did, make a joke they didn’t like, and suddenly a 54-year-old man was throwing a temper tantrum.

Yet somehow these were always the same guys obsessed with telling everybody else to “man up.”

That might as well have been the company slogan.

Got hurt? Man up.

Feeling sick? Man up.

Something heavy needs to be moved even though there’s equipment specifically designed to move it? Man up.

Need a day off because your body is falling apart after working sixty hours? Man the fuck up, pussy.

Some of these guys would have shown up to work with a gunshot wound and spent eight hours bleeding onto the production floor if they thought somebody would give them imaginary man points for it.

I never understood this mentality. There’s nothing manly about turning a minor injury into a major one because you were too stupid to stop working. If your shoulder is fucked up and continuing to lift heavy shit is going to make it worse, then stop lifting heavy shit. Your ancestors aren’t going to descend from Valhalla and confiscate your testicles because you went to physical therapy.

Pointlessly suffering doesn’t make you tough. It makes you a tool bag.

Neither does losing your shit whenever something doesn’t go your way.

In fact, I always found it funny that the guys most obsessed with projecting this image of themselves as tough men were usually the most emotionally fragile people in the building. Normal criticism could set them off. Somebody disagreeing with them could set them off. Asking them to redo something could set them off. They’d scream, throw shit, punch walls, threaten people, then somehow walk away convinced they had demonstrated how masculine they were.

My four-year-old nephew handles disappointment better than you.

My own time at that company eventually ended after one of these tough guys, an ex-Army Ranger manager, decided he was going to get physical with me after I finally told his daughter to shut the fuck up when she insulted me for roughly the bajillionth time. He pushed me, I pushed him back, and apparently my push was enough to send this elite warrior stumbling backwards, rolling his ankle, and hitting the wall.

Then he threatened to press charges.

I didn’t even shove him that hard.

There’s more to that story, but that’s an article for another day. The point here is that if you’re going to walk around trying to provoke fights because you’ve built your entire personality around being a tough guy, threatening to call the police the moment somebody pushes back makes you look ridiculous. Everybody postures sometimes, myself included, but some guys spend half their lives desperately trying to prove something to everyone around them.

Nobody cares how tough you are.

While we’re calling out male bullshit, let’s talk about sex.

Guys have this really weird double standard where we’ll call a woman disgusting for sleeping with a bunch of men, then congratulate another guy for sleeping with a bunch of women. Somehow the woman is a slut while the man is a legend.

Being a slut is disgusting regardless of gender.

I’ve never understood why I’m supposed to be impressed because some dude has slept with fifty different women. Congratulations, I guess? You had sex. People have been doing that for several hundred thousand years. Dogs can figure it out without anyone explaining it to them.

Sleeping indiscriminately with as many people as possible isn’t some incredible accomplishment. It’s a great way to catch something that makes your dick burn when you pee.

I once had a friend invite me over to his house and tell me to open a small closet. Inside was a trash bag, which he told me to pull out. I opened the bag and discovered a large collection of women’s underwear, some of which very obviously hadn’t been washed before being tossed in there.

Apparently these were trophies.

Different women had left them behind after having sex with him over the years, so he collected them all in a garbage bag and proudly displayed the collection whenever he wanted to impress another guy.

He seemed genuinely confused when my reaction wasn’t admiration.

My brother in Christ, you have a garbage bag full of used women’s underwear hidden in your closet. You’re not Hugh Hefner. You’re a fucking creep.

Speaking of creepy behavior, I’ve thankfully been out of the dating game for more than twelve years, but I still have friends who are single. Some are guys, some are women, and between the stories I hear and screenshots I get shown, modern dating appears to be an absolute nightmare.

Some of you guys aren’t helping yourselves.

I may just be old-fashioned here, but I can’t understand why any grown man believes an unsolicited picture of his penis is a good opening strategy.

Who told you this works?

You wouldn’t walk up to a woman at Acme, pull your dick out next to the produce section, and expect her to be impressed. At least I hope you wouldn’t. Somehow putting a smartphone between you and the woman makes guys forget that flashing strangers is generally considered creepy behavior.

You’re the digital equivalent of those old perverts in movies wearing nothing underneath a trench coat.

Then there are the guys who absolutely cannot take a hint.

I constantly hear men complain about women sending mixed signals. Sometimes that absolutely happens. I’ve personally dealt with women who acted incredibly interested one day, then completely cold the next, only to become interested again the moment I stopped paying attention to them. Dating can be confusing because people are confusing.

But sometimes the signal isn’t mixed at all.

I’ve seen conversations where some guy is sending paragraphs to a woman and receiving responses like “lol,” “yeah,” and “cool,” yet somehow he’s still trying to figure out when he should ask her out again.

Bro.

She’s not interested.

If you’re constantly initiating every conversation, writing walls of text, asking questions, trying to make plans, and generally carrying the entire interaction while she responds with the enthusiasm of somebody answering a customer service survey, move on.

You don’t have to get angry about it. You don’t have to call her a bitch. You don’t need to send some giant farewell message explaining how women never appreciate nice guys.

Just stop talking to her.

Modern dating already sucks enough for men. Dating apps are heavily skewed, competition is brutal, and plenty of perfectly decent guys get ignored. Why make things harder by spending three months chasing one woman who clearly doesn’t give a shit about you? Have some goddamn dignity.

There are billions of women on this planet. I promise you that random thot on Tinder isn’t your last chance at happiness.

There’s another trend among younger guys that genuinely confuses me, and that’s the complete lack of basic life skills.

I’m not talking about guys who still live with their parents. Housing is expensive as hell, wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, and moving out just because society says you should isn’t necessarily a smart financial decision. If you’re living at home, working, saving money, and contributing to the household, good for you.

I’m talking about grown-ass men who still need their mothers to take care of them.

You’re 25 years old and can’t do laundry?

You can’t cook anything that doesn’t come from DoorDash?

You don’t know how to clean a bathroom?

Your bedroom smells like ass, there are Mountain Dew bottles surrounding your Xbox, dirty clothes are piled in the corner, and your mother still changes your sheets?

What the fuck are you doing?

These aren’t advanced survival skills. Nobody is asking you to forge your own tools, hunt a buffalo, or build a log cabin using nothing but an axe. You’re putting detergent into a washing machine and pressing a button.

Learn how to take care of yourself.

I don’t care if you eventually want a traditional relationship where your wife handles more of the household stuff. That’s between you and her. You should still be capable of doing these things yourself. Life happens. Your girlfriend gets sick. Your wife goes away for a week. You become single. Suddenly you’re standing in front of the washing machine Googling what the little symbols mean because Mommy isn’t there.

Unless you happen to meet a woman who’s into age play, in which case congratulations on finding your niche, most women don’t want to be your mother.

Basic adulthood shouldn’t be a gendered skill.

I can cook. I can clean. I can do laundry. I can go grocery shopping. I can make appointments. I can manage my own money. None of this makes me special, because these are basic things that every functioning adult should know how to do.

Being helpless isn’t masculine.

Neither is constantly needing everyone around you to know how masculine you are.

That seems to be the thread connecting a lot of this behavior. The pointless suffering, the aggression, the womanizing, the posturing, the refusal to admit weakness. It’s all insecurity disguised as strength.

Actual confidence doesn’t require a performance.

A confident man can admit he’s hurt. He can walk away from a pointless fight. He can get rejected by a woman without turning into a stalker or writing a manifesto about how all women are evil. He can cook his own dinner without worrying that sautéing a chicken breast somehow makes him less of a man.

He also doesn’t need to constantly remind everybody that he’s an “alpha male.”

For fuck’s sake, stop calling yourself an alpha male.

If you have to explain to everyone that you’re the alpha, you probably aren’t.

Look, I’m not trying to turn this into some giant apology on behalf of men. I’ve said before and I’ll continue to say that women pull plenty of bullshit, and modern society sometimes gives them passes for behavior that men would never get away with. I’m not retracting any of that.

But guys can be just as fucking stupid.

I’ve worked with them. I’ve been friends with them. I’ve watched them torpedo relationships, careers, friendships, and sometimes their own bodies because they were more concerned with looking tough than acting like functional adults.

Occasionally I’ve been one of those idiots myself.

The goal shouldn’t be proving that men are worse than women or women are worse than men. That argument is stupid because people in general are capable of being enormous assholes. Gender just changes some of the ways we express it.

So the next time you’re getting ready to complain about women being dramatic, manipulative, irrational, promiscuous, immature, or incapable of taking responsibility for themselves, make sure you’re not doing the male version of the exact same shit.

Some of you guys are standing inside very fragile houses while throwing some pretty big rocks.

Put the damn rock down.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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