Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part II)

It takes two for an abusive relationship. Because an abuser can't abuse a person who isn't there.

Image by Mircea Iancu from Pixabay

The podcast:

This is Part II. Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part I) is right here.

I remember the men I mistreated.

Like Boring Bob and Jimmy, both from Great Expectations, which turned out to be a bust.

Boring Bob was twelve years older than I, but he was kind of cute and had a good job. Unfortunately, we had little in common. His hobby was the stock market. His musical tastes were stuck in the 1970s with Neil Diamond and the Beatles. I liked Blink 182, Green Day and Three Doors Down. “You sound like my nephews,” he harrumphed.

I had a three-date rule before giving up on a guy. I kindly told Bob it wasn’t going to work. He made a fuss and pleaded for a fourth date so I went, but he wasn’t any more interesting. I broke it off.

He kept calling and eventually he talked me into one last date. Once more, with feelin’. Or not. I said no, firmly.

The calls continued, about once a month, and he was getting on my nerves. How pathetic of him to be such a nag! I should have gotten caller ID, or told him to STOP CALLING ME, DAMMIT! but I’d dug several feet farther down my hole. My anger turned into a game to see how much crap he’d take before he gave up. He’d signed up to be my Abuse Toy. It felt good to hurt someone the way others had hurt me. He was so willing to take all my crap.

He’d call, I’d insult him.

I called him pathetic. I told him he was a loser. I began taunting him with other men.

“I’m fucking around,” I bragged.

“Well, okay,” he’d say, sounding disappointed. “If—that’s what you want. I mean, I can settle for that if that’s what you want.”

“Including other men?”

“Well—yeah.”

I was a decade away from Please, guys, don’t be this guy! Never let a woman treat you this way!

“Seriously, man? You’d be willing to be part of my harem?”

“It’s not what I want but—okay.”

“Can we get together soon?” he asked.

“I’m leaving Wednesday for England,” I told him. “To see my friend Gareth. We’ve had an affair already and now it’s my turn to visit. I’m going to have wild sex with him!”

I can’t imagine why anyone would still want to date someone that toxic.

“I’m never going to fuck you,” I’d tell him. Bob wanted love, and I enjoyed being cruel.

He let me.

It doesn’t excuse me in the slightest, but guys—it takes two to tango.

I ended it eventually, not because I felt bad about what I’d done but because I realized this is how one can potentially create a stalker. I called Great Expectations and asked them to get him off my ass.

They called later to confirm they’d threatened to cancel his membership if he called me again. And he ranted about how I hadn’t given him a chance—

Another guy from GE was Jimmy. He brayed like a donkey when he talked. He wasn’t very attractive. But he was a nice guy. I feel even more guilt about him than I do for Bob, and I feel like a scumbag about Bob.

Jimmy didn’t agree to become my abuse toy, and in fact I admire him for telling me to go fuck myself. He took me out for dinner—by this time I was callously using Great Expectations for free dinners since I despaired of ever finding anyone in the year I’d paid for—and he didn’t make a good impression. He was a former military sniper who was proud of all the men he’d killed. Now, I understand war is ugly, but bragging about kills was pretty inappropriate first-date conversation, and the first sign Jimmy possessed little common sense, which repeated itself on a memorable second date ending with me ditching him. I received an angry phone call later in which we agreed to get together and talk things out, but then I came home to another angry voice mail telling me, I forget exactly how, to go fuck myself.

Good on you, Jimmy. You took back your power. You refused my shit.

Years later, Jimmy went nuts. If you’ve ever read American Sniper you know how crazy that life is. In fact, the author was himself killed by a Marine with PTSD at a shooting range. I often wondered whether the author might have gone crazy himself later. It’s not natural for humans to kill, although they can be taught. I looked for Jimmy online after finishing the book and found his strange obituary, which didn’t mention his military service.

I learned that a few years prior, he was arrested a few times, once for shoplifting in a grocery store in a trench coat with ammo in the pockets and guns in his car. It doesn’t look like he was planning a mass shooting that day, and perhaps not at all. But they sent him to a famous New England psychiatric hospital.

I suspect he committed suicide but I can’t confirm it.

I probably didn’t have anything to do with it, but I can’t swear I didn’t contribute in my own brief way.

I’d wanted to apologize to him and Bob, years later, after I moved to Canada, but a male friend talked me out of it. He said I’d just re-traumatize them, that I should let it go.

I wish I hadn’t listened. Bob died just a few years ago, and doesn’t appear ever to have married.

I wish I’d apologized to both of them. There were others, too, who put up with my short-term anger. Like the gorgeous-but-stupid guy I intended to use for sex who turned out to be semi-impotent from alcoholism and was only interested in beer and rock ‘n’ roll.

I remember leaving him sitting on his bed naked, looking dejected, and telling him the alcohol was making him a limp dick. Looking back, it’s a wonder sometimes I didn’t get murdered. My anger made me reckless.

Sometimes it was expressed not by cruelty to others but simply not being honest with them. I once dated two guys. I knew they assumed I was seeing no one else and had they asked I would have been honest, but they didn’t so I said nothing. They would surely have been angry and hurt had they known I was sleeping with them both. They each gave me flowers. When one came over I hid the other’s flowers in the closet; then I’d switch them for the other guy.

They never found out, ergo never got hurt. But it doesn’t exonerate me. It wasn’t right.

What a piece of work I was. My mother didn’t raise me this way.

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Maybe there are a lot of angry women in the world who train some guys to expect crazy and bad treatment from women. It’s why I have sympathy for abused men, too. I know what bitches women can be. I was one.

When I abused Bob, I took a sick pleasure in it. I unloaded a lot of baggage and garbage he hadn’t earned. And he was a good guy. We would never have been happy together but I wonder if bad women like me ruined him forever for marriage. Instead of trying to get me to fall in love with him—which was never going to happen, not even if I was less insane—he should have been finding a woman worthy of him. He had a good heart. He was adult and responsible, but not good at identifying serious headcases. There were women who could have shared his enthusiasm for playing the stock market, who perhaps he could have happily taught.

Jimmy would never have made for a good partner or husband, dying mysteriously five years after me. I knew when he bragged about killing 59 people, that he might well turn violent some day. My dates with him served as the opening chapter in a dark fantasy novel I wrote years later, Tales From The Anonymous Divorced Witchbabe. The angry, entitled main character was, not surprisingly, partially based on myself, with an offline dating service I called Nickleby’s. Some of the main character’s dating woes were based on a few other men I met through Great Expectations and whom I treat with more sympathy in the novel than I did in real life.

The Canadian guy who was willing to shag a racist

I’ll call him Inconnu, the French word for ‘unknown’. I don’t remember his name. He was a Canadian immigrant, like myself, except from a country with a well-earned reputation for aggressive horndogginess. I don’t want to slam his home country, so we’ll call it Ecuarico, which was the name of the fake country of an exiled South American dictator who briefly invades Gilligan’s Island.

I met Inconnu at a party and I’d implemented a new rule for Toronto men: Don’t talk to or engage with guys from Ecuarico. They greatly lacked social and romantic skills and this guy was so aggressive I actually Googled the next morning, ‘Why are Ecuarican guys so…” and before I could type the last word the dropdown showed me other popular endings to this question. Which ended in ‘aggressive’, ‘horny’, ‘persistent’, etc. The complaints about Ecuarican guys were global. The country itself has a very bad reputation for the way it treats women.

By the time Inconnu arrived I’d had a few drinks. I get chattier and friendlier when I drink, so even though I thought, “Don’t talk to the Ecuarican guy! Don’t talk to the Ecuarican guy!” I did anyway. We had a few conversations and when I was ready to leave he said, “Oh, are you going home? So am I. Why don’t we ride on the subway together?”

“Sure!” I said.

So of course, we hadn’t finished the five-minute walk to the subway when he asked, “What kind of guys do you like to date?”

I was past Peak Angry Bitch period, so I didn’t say what I wanted to say—“Anyone except Ecuarican guys!” which I would have a few years previously, but it explains how things went down afterward. We were both pretty drunk and his persistence activated Bitch Mode.

I fended off his advances (all verbal) until politeness ran out. “No, I’m not going out with you. Stop asking.” I should have said, “Knock it off right now or I’m going to sit over there and read my e-book!”

But he’d just agreed to become my Abuse Toy. I think I had a fleeting memory of Boring Bob.

The more he persisted, the nastier I got. I abused him, I insulted him, but no matter what I said, he still wanted to fuck date me. And of course I lost all respect for him. It turned into a game once again. How much shit will he take before he gives up?

He was so persistent I got racist. I eschew racism in all its forms but I wanted to see if he was so pathetic he’d want sex with someone who treated him like an inferior. This is one of the most shameful things I’ve ever done. But I remind you: Remember George Costanza in Seinfeld wanting to fuck the hot Nazi white supremacist chick? I remembered, that night.

“Listen,” I told him, “I don’t fuck Ecuarican guys. I NEVER fuck Ecuarican guys. You’re all disgusting. You’re horny as fuck. And you guys are mad for blonde white women, aren’t you! You’ll do anything to fuck us, won’t you!”

The main reason I’d decided not to talk to or engage with Ecuarican guys is because of their own racist fetishization of white women, and especially blonde white women. They’re famous for it. They’re not the only men who do it, there’s a whole part of the world I could name that also fetishizes blonde white women—as I was to learn from my Googling the following morning, because porn is primarily Western-produced which means many of the actresses are blonde white women.

“I never fuck brown penises. (Not true. I’d already had one or two.) You are never, ever, in a million years, going to plug your tiny little brown Ecuarican penis into me. This is one blonde #$%^& you are never going to see, much less touch!”

I forget what else I said—it was late at night so there was no one else in our car—but I kept insulting his country, his penis size and his manhood, and still, still, still—he wanted to fuck me, no matter what I said.

He was a thousand times more pathetic than Boring Bob. Not to mention an embarrassing stereotype.

It was a long trip home. I’d expected he’d get off somewhere before me but he didn’t; he lived in my neighborhood. He insisted on walking me to my building. It sure wasn’t out of any sense of honor or concern for my safety.

“Why are you being so racist?” he asked.

“Because you’re a pathetic loser and I wanted to see how much of my crap you’d take. You’re such a loser you’re willing to fuck a racist. For fuck’s sake, get some self-esteem!”

He walked away.

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Jim McCoy believes emotional and psychological abuse are worse than physical. Bones and flesh heal.

Brains and souls, not so easily.

I had legitimate grievances about treatment by men, but none who were abusive. Rude, inconsiderate, insensitive, sometimes dumber than dirt, but not a single one worthy of my treatment. Single men still remain relentlessly clueless about women while drowning in an ocean of information about them, which is why I don’t date anymore. Not out of a sense of anger or hostility; I’m just tired of cluelessness. I’m romantically exhausted. I keep telling myself I’m done with it but then a few years later I’m back online trying again, hoping once again for love (that’s all there is; have I mentioned that?). I joined various F2F groups before the pandemic but most guys were too young and others showed no interest. Granted, Canadian men are extremely passive.

Trauma always remains with us. You can move beyond it with meditation, therapy, cathartic art, or whatever, and change your life. Then one day something triggers you and your brain snaps back to 1992 and you’re yelling at some ancient asshole while your current partner stares at you in disbelief wondering where the hell this is coming from.

It’s part of the reason why I wrote an article last year pondering the people I’ve hurt, and wanting to apologize—forty years later.

What I crucify myself for is how I handled myself. I can genuinely argue ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know’, like how online dating was a Sears catalog that commoditizes human beings. Or that just as Jerry was tossing me overboard, far more people were availing themselves of free online porn, that soulless algorithms fed their customers endless wank gratification, including more extreme and violent porn and even kiddie porn. Young girls and young women watched it and taught them that a woman’s place was to be a slut and do whatever filthy thing a man wanted.

I didn’t know, when I re-entered the dating scene in the early 2000s, just how stacked the deck was against me. And everyone else too, including men. I didn’t know that Buddhist psychology wasn’t all a bunch of shit. What I blame myself for is choosing to dig my own hole and even flirt with evil one dark night. What I’m responsible for is becoming a horrible person, at least for a time.

It wasn’t all my fault. It wasn’t all their fault.

I feel obligated to mention again, my mother didn’t raise me this way. So don’t blame her, or my father. They raised me to a be a good person.

I even bought that silly Rules book about playing your grandma’s games to snag a man. “Well I tried honesty and consideration,” I told myself. “And that didn’t work. So let’s try deception and games. Isn’t doing the same thing over and over again the definition of insanity?”

I was right, and it was. Honesty and consideration really had failed. But I still knew better. I always knew better, however I rationalized.

When I tell women to stop letting him treat you like that, to grow some labia, reclaim your power and don’t be the victim, I fucking mean it. I’ve never tolerated bad treatment from men, but some have tolerated it from me. I am 100% responsible for myself, but you can’t abuse a person who isn’t there.

Don’t be that guy! As Jim McCoy eloquently put it. Not to mention a retired abusive bitch.

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Don’t Be The Victim - My Substack anti-abuse articles

When I’m not thanking Buddha for showing me a better way, my friends for putting up with me and sticking with me through the dark times, and Canada for being a great country to move to, well, I do what I do here on Grow Some Labia.