On weapons and wild animals

On one hand, yes, I fully understand that it is almost unbearably cringe to have a male main character who is consistently described as "wolfish." Even before there were weird guys on the internet, there were weird guys in real life who fashioned themselves as mysterious lone wolves destined to go against the grain in all aspects of life.

But the long-debunked myth of the "lone wolf" in nature is a blast to play straight; a character who's being made to perform a role isn't real.

Lately I've been writing on the theme of performances. As a Black woman with AuDHD, I can't help but feel like masking and code-switching are one and the same. It makes me wonder, then: is "posturing" the male version? When, say, dudes can't perform a certain brand of masculinity perfectly — when they're not stoic, wealthy, and showcasing every possible marker of success — is the false bravado the mask? The language men learn speak when they're prohibited from speaking their own?

It's questions like these that confirm for me that I'm using my creative work to better understand the world around me. If we're being real, many of my problems in life have been self-inflicted. But, of those other people have brought me, almost all of them — and certainly the most harrowing — have been the brainchild of men. When I look around and listen to the traumatic stories of women and men, theirs are also at the hands of a specific type of dude.

I, and many others, have been trained not to empathize with men's experiences. At all. Getting into these characters' heads is sort of writing me out of my empathy hole.

Don't get me wrong; I consider keeping my distance from the majority of men in my real life an act of self-care. But it's always felt eerie to me, how many of said men seem to operating from the same playbook, insisting on the same tired pseudoscience as fact ("Women are hardwired for XYZ!"). The guys in my life are real people with real opinions; the men out there intentionally fashion themselves as dangerous, violent lone wolves at worst, and irresponsible pets who need to be fed and fucked at best. It genuinely feels like these dudes want to be wild animals so bad.

It's a performance.

The longer I write this story, the more it becomes a feminist parable told from the perspective of a regular guy resisting the world's demands that he discard his heart to become the perfect weapon, more animal than man.

I could be talking out of my ass. I'm just a girl, sitting alone in a cafe, writing silly stories about a witch hunter who hates his job.

But it's worth considering. Maybe all the world's trauma is just us being forced to perform — autistics masking for neurotypical comfort, women fawning for men's comfort, men posturing for men's comfort. It makes the problem easier to spot. Easier to name.

And once you've named the problem plaguing all of us, it's easier to work together to "solve" it...whatever that means.