The Post-Election Booty Calls Have Begun

Suddenly, men desperately need women to fix their feelings.

As soon as Trump’s win was announced, I noticed something interesting: Many of the men I have slept with, considered sleeping with, or wanted to sleep with suddenly reappeared. They are desperate, it seems, to fuck their way out of their feelings, and they are wondering: Will I please offer myself as their rage receptacle?

Look, I get it. I scheduled a sex date with my A/C repairman for the morning after the election. I knew that no matter what happened, I would want sex. And woof, I was right.

But cathartic sex with a guy I’m currently involved with is one thing. The guys coming out of the woodwork right now are another thing entirely. These aren’t men I have ongoing flings with (although those men have reappeared, too). Several were men who had ghosted me long ago. And now they are back, requesting access to my body to make themselves feel better.

It’s not just me. Here’s a text a friend received the other day from a guy who had ghosted her in mid-September:

Again — I’m not against post-election distraction sex. But this isn’t just about guys wanting sex. This is about guys dismissing women until they desire something from them. This is about guys conceiving of women’s bodies as tools for their pleasure. This is about guys expecting women to hold, manage, and fix their feelings. This is about patriarchy.

The guys requesting sex from me are, ostensibly, the good ones — the ones who voted for Kamala. (Not that voting for a rational, intelligent candidate with a vagina, rather than a despicable narcissist with a penis, is a particularly high bar.) Yet some of my encounters with these men have reeked of misogyny. From how they have talked about sex, to how they have engaged with me over dinner, to how they have acted when in bed.

Take the “adventurous” guy who viciously spat in my mouth, despite my insistence that he always ask for consent before trying new things — and who then insisted he “did it for me,” as if I didn’t actually know what I wanted. And the guy who asked me two questions over the course of a three hour date, as if I couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say — and who, when I declined a second date, wouldn’t accept my decision, arguing that my rationale was flawed.

These supposedly good men are still products of a misogynistic culture — one that expects them to conform to extremely limiting masculine ideals, and one that expects women to give them what they want and take on their emotional labor. These men probably don’t have close friends they can process their feelings with, because they have been raised in a society that tells them male friendships should be superficial. These men probably don’t have therapists because they believe that working on themselves is a mark of vulnerability. So instead, when they feel fragile, they seek out women they hardly know, asking those women to hold their feelings and lift their spirits. Some transform their fear and sadness into anger and rage, which they lob at women, too.

My ex was one of the good ones. Yet I didn’t notice how powerfully his emotions affected me — until he moved out. Suddenly, the tenor of my evening was no longer determined by the way a man closed the front door — and I felt so free.

The other day, I was listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and I realized that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone now means something different to me. It’s true that we often don’t realize how good things are until the good things are gone. But often, we don’t realize how bad things were until the things that were suffocating us go away. Then we feel oh so much lighter — like an invisible 200-pound person had been standing on our chest and suddenly stepped off. I realize now that I don’t need or want to take on all the male feelings anymore. I have plenty of my own.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ll lean into all the post-election booty calls that I want. I still want sex! I just don’t want patriarchal sex. And I’ll continue to hope that one day, men will start to learn how to hold onto and manage their own feelings. We’ll all be a lot better off when they do.