How to Identify Terrifying Men
Sydney Sheneman
I have always jokingly referred to myself as being a “magnet for terrifying men.”
“It’s my pheromones,” I say. “They attract every pervert within a hundred mile radius.”
Each time I make this joke, my mind conjures up the same image: me—simply existing—completely unaware of the miles wide, purple-hued cloud of pheromone fog surrounding me. The scene then begins to pan out, revealing herds of greasy old men wearing should-be-white wife beaters, their noses stuck up in the air as they trudge through my thick pheromone smog. Sometimes, I imagine the fog’s aroma to be similar to that of a grape-flavored candy’s—other times, I imagine it carries a more lavender-like scent. Either way, these greasy old men seem to find the smell so enticing that it all but pulls them towards me.
This vision is strange for several reasons:
- They’re usually not old and greasy—the terrifying men, I mean.
- Pheromones are invisible to the naked eye, and, therefore, are definitely not clouds of purple-hued vapor.
- Even if they were, humans aren’t really into the whole pheromones thing.
It’s easy to list off all the ways in which my brain’s purple pheromone fog scenario is unrealistic; what’s not so easy is compiling a list of all the identifying features shared by said terrifying men. In my twenty-years of experience I have discovered that, sure, some of these terrifying men are old, but some of them are thirteen-year-old boys who think that random girls on the internet
really want to be sent unsolicited pictures of their penises. And, sure, some of these terrifying men are a bit greasier than your average Joe, but some of them look as though they just stepped foot off set after filming a commercial for some flashy, overpriced cologne.
There is one thing, though, that I can add to this list—one trait that I know with complete certainty all these terrifying men share.
They most definitely, 100%, do not see women as living, breathing, human beings.
So then, how do these terrifying men view women? I spent some time—too much time, if I’m being honest—scouring the internet for an answer to this question. To nobody’s surprise, I’m sure, I was met with countless tweets about how women are only good for this and that—the this and that typically being sex and housework. I watched endless videos of men sitting in front of microphones insisting that “women are men’s property,” and I forced myself to scroll through the infinite heaps of blatant misogyny expressed by those who find way too much confidence hiding behind the internet’s shield of anonymity.
Out of curiosity—and an intense desire to rid my mind of the colorful opinions the internet had just shown me—I turned to Urban Dictionary: a notoriously unreliable source of information. Oddly enough, though, it proved to be extremely reliable in terms of the information I was looking for. In the little search bar located at the top of my screen, I typed in one word: woman. The first def