"You fuckin' faggot, get the fuck out of here."

The one moment in life I wish I had to do over. A war story from the frontlines of adolescence.

You fuckin’ faggot, get the fuck out of here.

Julian spits the the word “faggot” out as if he’s just tasted something disgusting that ended up in his mouth against his will. In his West Indian patois, his speech still has a singsong-y, reggae-like cadence, but there’s no disguising the hatred in his voice. Julian’s face is somewhat clenched, almost pained — the same face an attorney might make when discussing a grave injustice being imposed on their client. But there’s also a brutal coolness about him as his eyes glare at me across the compartments of his frozen lemonade cart, the sun reflecting off the metal back onto his face. He may as well be talking to a lowly, flea-bitten dog that he sees as beneath his dignity to even pay any mind to, other than to swat it away.

There’s so much venom in his voice, it sounds like he wishes his words would eradicate my existence on contact — which is, basically, what Julian is trying to do. That’s because Julian and I are both vying for the attention of the same girl. As an acne-ridden, gangly 16 year-old, I am no match for Julian’s chiseled muscles, handsome face, or suave charm. Julian, who’s in his mid-twenties, is clearly more appealing to Erica. Her face shines every morning when her eyes fall on him as the three of us arrive at the warehouse, far on Manhattan’s West Side, to push our carts eastward to our respective corner spots at more lucrative intersections in Midtown.

Like me, Erica has just finished her junior year in high school. Looking back with the benefit of 35 years’ worth of hindsight, Erica’s not exactly in Julian’s league either. Which is to say, she’s… not quite chubby — that would be too unflattering — but she’s obviously a teenager who appears similarly awkward in her body, dressing mostly in frumpy sweatshirts. So I can completely understand how getting the attention of an older man like Julian feels like an incredible boost. Where Erica has far surpassed me — and, perhaps, Julian too — is in her natural, gregarious poise that anchors her presence in a kind of foreshadowing of womanly assuredness, even if it’s still a bit of a mask at this point.

I haven’t changed the names of either party here because I think I’m the one who comes out looking the worst in this story. Yes, Julian was flirting with an underaged girl. I don’t vilify him in that regard. There was no indication that they were doing anything other than enjoying the glow of each other’s company, which I think is perfectly fine. Far less attractive, I think, is the way my high school crush on Erica turned into an obsessive focus. The way I carried that focus into the following school year — for a person who I, in truth, barely knew — and let it de-stabilize my life at the time is difficult to disclose publicly.

But if I'm being honest, putting the spotlight on Julian’s abhorrent behavior during a particularly ugly moment is the easy way out. I cannot adequately express the level of cringe I feel when I think back to how I responded to my attachment to the idea of this person: sending at least one (ugh) handwritten letter, befriending her brother, and going on and on about it over interminable phone calls with whoever would listen. One of those people was a former classmate of mine who had been romantically involved with Erica in the past.

As people are wont to do, she had confided aspects of the relationship that she’d found unsatisfactory, painting a picture of him as cold and detached. I can’t remember what pretext I’d used to initiate contact with him and engage him on the subject, but of course it didn’t take long before she began confiding in him about her distress over why on earth this boy was so preccupied with her after a few friendly conversations pushing carts across town. I distinctly remember him telling me that I needed to stop living in my mind. I can still hear the parental admonishment in his voice which, today, makes me chuckle inside. There’s something touching about a teenager feeling so assured in prescribing a roadmap to life for another teenager his same age.

Of course, he wasn’t exactly wrong, but of course I didn’t see it that way. “Where else would I live?” I responded. Incredulous at the question, he snorted back with an exasperated “In reality, maybe??” And there it was, where the rubber met the road, a declaration of a kind of universal code: if you get swept up in your mind, you will run afoul of what The World sanctions as acceptable. I remember feeling in that moment that I’d just taken a stand for a part of me that was just not going to budge. There is more to this life than what makes itself readily apparent. And, not for nothing, my own head can be a more reliable source of truth than what presents itself on the seemingly unyielding surface of “reality.”

This, however, wasn’t one of those times! Thankfully, I can say I never stalked Erica — but that was more by virtue of the fact that she lived too far away. Even if I didn’t physically stalk her, the energy was the same. (Although, for the record, digging up a rare import Cure album for her brother doesn’t fall under fall under the stalking umbrella, as far as I’m concerned. I did that out of genuine musical affinity.) At one point, one of my closest school friends took pity on me and, if memory serves, reached out to Erica and then, as patiently as he could, pleaded with me to understand that I’d mis-interpreted her “overtures of friendship.” He was right! It’s so easy to see that now — and that what I’d glommed-on to was, essentially, just amiable conversation charged by a feminine energy that was too unfamiliar to me at the time for me to be able to interpret properly.

Now that I have a better understanding of how the gears of romantic fixation operate, I completely sympathize with why the kid in this story — me — responded the way he did. And I can appreciate the steps it took to get from this one particularly heavy chapter in adolescence to the present, where I can recognize unrequited longing for what it is: a projection onto someone else of a tangle of things that reside within the self: including one’s own unacknowledged desirability. Limerence, as it’s called in psychology terms, is rarely about the other person and more about what the person becomes a stand-in for — literally an object.

That said, if Erica’s charm — and I mean her literal charm, as in: her ease with people — was enough to draw-in this older guy who appeared to have it so much more together than I did, then how can I blame myself for being, well, charmed by it? Still, it irks me to no end that this poor kid — her — was saddled with the weight of my outsized attention. There have certainly been times where I could point to someone and say they were sending mixed signals. (I could also say the same for myself at times.) But this wasn’t like that. From what I remember, it wouldn’t even be fair to say that Erica was flirting with me. I mean, she was basically just being friendly and sweet.

I, on the other hand, simply didn’t have enough interaction with women under my belt to discern jovial rapport from ambiguous tension. And so I undoubtedly ended up giving her an unwelcome lesson in the dangers of just talking to men. And it doesn’t sit well that this may have left lingering impressions on her regarding male desire and its myriad pitfalls. That, above all, is what bothers me here. And though I’m concentrating mainly on how two males locked horns (barely) while circling around a young lady, the most mysterious and unresolved part of the story happens to be the one I can’t speak for. So, in the absence of being able to speak for her, I can only walk you through the wreckage of my own experiences, and the awareness that has almost grudgingly sunken-in along the way — hoping that this awareness might resonate with your own experiences…

If you were to map-out my emotional state vis-à-vis the various romantic interests who have come and gone from the picture, you’d notice a trend where, at times, I’ve emotionally spun-out and sunken into depths of despair, sometimes for months on end. More tellingly, though, when actual relationships of substance have dissolved, there’s been a tendency for me to walk away from them with alarming ease, almost as if I felt nothing at all. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to reconcile that those two responses, in fact, belong to the same person. At first glance, they’d appear to be coming from completely different people, even to me.

Now before you take too much pity on the pimply high schooler being speared through the heart by an older, more seasoned man, there’s also a dizzying contrast between that version of me and the version to which female attention has, at times, just fallen into my lap — even though I understood that just as little as I understood Erica’s unreceptiveness. I should also say that there have been times when my tendency to get caught in the tractor beam of pining for someone wasn’t actually off-base. In some cases, the feelings were returned, but I didn’t find out until years after the fact. Regardless, limerence is no less destructive when it’s mutual. And one could write a whole book about why it’s profoundly unattractive when men become needy and obsessive. But was Julian, smooth operator that he was, any less vulnerable than I was? Wasn’t he a sitting duck too?

Whenever the words “you fuckin’ faggot” ring out in my head, of course I feel a flash of anger towards him, but that’s nothing compared to how angry I feel at myself. However awkward, self-conscious, and lacking in toughness I may have been at the time, I did have the capacity to snap back at him. The kids on my block were not only side-splittingly funny, but they could come up with extremely inventive things to say about your mother. Just by virtue of being around them, I’d developed a fairly reliable rapid-fire sense of humor. I wasn’t the most quick-witted of the pack, but I could certainly hold my own.

For whatever reason, though, my wits abandoned me when Julian decided to lay-in. Which is why it’s the one moment above all that I’d like to have back to do over again. Because there were so many things I could’ve said:

If I’m such a faggot, why you gotta go after a dumpy white girl who’s still in high school?

Maybe when I’m your age I’ll do better than chasing after some basic chick who isn’t even 18…

What do you think her Jewish parents are gonna say if they see your black ass around? You’d better hope they don’t call the cops or that she doesn’t accuse you of rape, because they’re gonna love that pretty face in prison and I bet you’ll sound great saying “fuck my ass” in that accent…

Believe it or not, I don’t replay the scene over and over in my head, acting-out these kinds of imaginary comebacks. But I do look back on it with the sense that I had it in me to say something. Yes, I could have gone for the nuclear option — there were, in fact, multiple nuclear options. And yes, I would’ve considered it perfectly in-bounds to go for the jugular by pushing the race button. Did I think there was anything wrong with a black West Indian man dating a white Jewish woman from Queens? Absolutely not. New York is a wonderful mosaic of all kinds of inter-ethnic pairings. I am, in fact, the product of such a pairing. My mom being from Puerto Rico and my dad being from India meant that my parents hailed from two universes so disparate they were unlikely to ever come into contact. And yet, here I am.

But did I have a problem with this man making advances on the girl that I liked? I would’ve had a problem with any man in that position. So, would I have exploited his underlying insecurities about the racial element? Hell yes. I would have said anything I could have to punish another man for being on the same trail — regardless of the consequences to that man. Look, for all I know her parents could have been Civil Rights activists. But was it more likely that the spectre of disapproval loomed over their interactions? Absolutely.

Was it likely that this weighed on Julian, even unconsciously? I don’t see how it couldn’t have. If we’re playing the odds, their “romance,” if just on a platonic level, was basically forbidden before you even got to the age issue. So, needless to say, there was ammo well within reach for me to pick up. I’m still not sure why I didn’t go there — other than the obvious, which is that what he was saying hit me where it hurt, so I was stunned into silence.

You just don’t get to practice for this kind of situation very often. Life’s most pivotal moments most often take you by surprise. No matter how many snappy comebacks I’d dished out, aa crude comment about your mom — even an angry insult — from a friend just isn’t the same as when someone dances on your Achilles heal. And it also worked in the other direction too: one of my closest neighborhood friends, for example, once called me “faggot” because I dared stand up to him after he’d crossed a line and done something inexcusably shitty to me. We remained as close as siblings after that. Crucially, though, when I recall the memory, I don’t feel hurt at all — on the contrary, I feel proud of having stood my ground.

So, to anyone who would get ruffled at my invoking the term “your black ass,” you have to understand that this is how the people I grew up around spoke. People of color talking shit to each other routinely say out-of-pocket things that would not make it past today’s polite-society filters, especially if they’re trying to be insulting. Rewind the clock back to 1989 and the standards were obviously less stringent than they are today. In other words: I heard people say shit. It wasn’t always elegant — and it did tip over into the murky waters of racial angst — but it wasn’t always malicious either.

Would Julian have gotten pissed? Most definitely — but also, he’d likely have been less upset than if I’d been white. Not that he or anyone else would’ve have thought I had license to call him “nigger” in the pejorative sense, i.e: with the hard “er" — there are layers here. I wouldn’t have called him that anyway, but the whole point would have been to strike a nerve. It’s not like Julian was threatening me physically — he spoke to me as if the prospect were beneath him — but I felt threatened nonetheless. And as a cornered 16 year-old, I can guarantee you I’d have been operating from my reptile brain.

Would I take such a cheap shot now, as an adult? No. But would I feel better if 16 year-old me had reached for whatever weapon I could find rather than say nothing? Yes. Because when a man is staring you down as if he has the divine right to demean you all the way to the sub-atomic level, that’s when the gloves need to come off. I would feel better about that entire experience — mortifying as it was in so many ways — had I done whatever it would’ve taken to strike the same chord of pain as Julian was taking the liberty to strike in me.

Let’s remember that he had zero qualms about speaking to me in kind. In my view, he should have been met with an equal measure of ruthless disregard. He was reminding me of my place, at least as far as he saw it. In fact, he was taking pleasure in rubbing my nose in it. Would it have been wrong exactly to bring the full weight of unjust social attitudes to bear on one person? It’s tough for me to call it “wrong” given the circumstances. In any case, would my teenaged consciousness have at least considered going there if my brain and tongue hadn’t been stunned into paralysis? You bet.

If I were to watch this story unfold between two other people or characters onscreen, I’d root for the underdog to find his voice and use it. So it’s not that I actually thought Julian was unworthy of Erica’s affections, but that the society around us didn’t see it that way. And if you’re going to puff your chest out and start pounding on an inferior, under-equipped opponent, it’s only fair that your opponent will resort to whatever leverage they can in order to level the playing field. Moreover, it was clear to me — even back then — that him being black with a West Indian accent was exotic to her.

I’m not saying there wasn’t a genuine spark of affinity between these two people. And when I look back on their interactions, I’m able to see them un-filtered through my own jealousy and hurt. What stands out is how wholesome and innocent the whole situation looks to my eye now. And if I were able to write their story over again, I’d gladly write myself out of the it! Knowing what I know now — that you win some and lose some, and that there isn’t always so much at stake when you have a crush on someone — I’d rather they just have been able to enjoy the few stolen moments of each other’s company while I went off and got lost in the music on my Walkman.

In the grand scheme, there was nothing for me to lose by walking away because it had already been lost. On the other hand, they barely got to interact because meeting each other outside of work would’ve gotten them dangerously close to a social taboo, possibly with disastrous and criminal consequences. These days, of course, I have enough life experience to just shrug my shoulders and back off whenever I find myself in “competition” for someone’s attention. Alas, I had no way of knowing back then how easy it is to do so, and to do it with your dignity intact. So there I was, catching shit from someone who didn’t want to compete with someone he wasn’t in competition with.

Although it would be years later that I would know what it feels like to be viewed as exotic myself, I had a dim but palpable sense that that dynamic underscored the attraction between them. There’s a good chance, in fact, that even if Julian had “succeeded” in seeing this through to consummation, it would’ve left him feeling worse — like a curiosity, a dalliance a young woman indulged in on her way to living her real life, while he spun his wheels in a state of suspense playing the lothario.

If I knew this, then he knew it too. Which might explain some of his anger. He and I also both knew that he was punching below his weight. Was it fair to call Erica dumpy or “basic”? No — and basic wasn’t a catchphrase back then anyway. But it would certainly have cut close to the bone to point this out. Sure, Julian could easily have clapped back with “It doesn’t matter because you couldn’t pull a girl half as attractive as her,” but he’d have been lying. We both knew that Erica wasn’t a woman but a work in progress.

Julian had to know that he was stooping where he could have set his sites higher, directing his attention at a woman who could stand shoulder to shoulder with him as an equal, rather than someone who looked at him through the blinding lens of pure admiration. Of course, one could write volumes about why men tend to gravitate toward the latter rather than the former, but that’s not my focus here. And in any case, it’s not like we accuse Julian of being the exception to the rule. And again, I should stress: I don’t have any indication that Julian had any real designs on getting any closer to Erica than friendly flirting at work.

The more I look back on it, his frustration with me may have been a reflection of the fact that he was, in fact, exercising self-control and just wanted to have those few fleeting moments of Erica’s attention to himself. Fair enough, but his response still strikes as way over the top. And one would think it would’ve been all too easy to kick the shaky leg out from under him — so easy, in fact, that I imagine he’d have gotten angry enough to put hands on me had I pulled the trigger and gone for broke. I’d have gladly taken the ass-kicking just to say things that left lingering damage. No matter what he would’ve done, he wouldn’t have been able to un-do what I’d said — most notably, the fact that it was all true.

As it happens, though, I didn’t say anything. I stood there and took it. I swallowed my voice, waiving my right — indeed, my responsibility — to defend myself. And I’ve never forgiven myself since. Obviously, Julian had enough of my tagging along. And now that I think about it, there’s something almost endearing about the image of the three of us huffing and puffing our carts through bustling Manhattan streets in 90-degree heat. Had Julian actually possessed the confidence to assess the situation more soberly, he would have just rolled his eyes and put up with my presence.

Why wasn’t he able to just fall-back on the knowledge that I was no threat to him at all? I can’t exactly say I blame him. Nor can I claim that I don’t have the same reflex to be as vicious as what he showed that day. I’ve never outright called someone a “fuckin’ faggot,” but in the cases where I was afforded the chance to wave another suitor off — to literally get across to them that they were inferior, and that I savored letting them know that they’d stumbled in pursuit of the same love interest — I was not kind about it. In fact, I reveled in it.

There’s a certain pleasure a man takes when he’s expressing to another man that he has the ability to end the other man’s genetic lineage. I don’t think men consciously think of their competition in these terms, but you don’t have to look very far into chimpanzee behavior to see the parallels in our own patterns. You could say that I was only playing by the rules I learned from people like Julian, but I don’t think that’s fair. Nor is it fair to say that this one event, though certainly life-defining, was responsible for directing my path thereafter.

Julian was, in fact, just a signpost of how far down this path I’d already come. So I think it’s more accurate to say that this was, in a sense, a form of pre-emptive karma. As someone who’s been on both sides of this equation, I think I can speak to it from a vantage point of having dual insights. I actually think it’s a blessing in disguise that I was born into a situation where male aggressiveness was highly valued — expected, actually — but where I was often low on the totem pole. Because it ensured that I’ve never felt like I could afford to bluster my way through life without being careful of how I speak to people, specifically other men.

Yes, I’ll admit that I haven’t always been as careful as I should be, but I’ve never been completely blind to the fact that I’ve got to be respectful if I want to avoid confrontations that could get ugly. There’s no way in hell Julian would’ve felt free to speak to an actual man the same way he spoke to me. It would have cost him too much energy to risk getting his block knocked off right there in the street. Instead, he fell for the temptation to go for the easy target. It’s also likely that men at his level wouldn’t have focused on a still-developing target like Erica.

So, if that hot summer afternoon was a test of manhood, you could say that both Julian and I failed with flying colors. And I imagine we’ve both been coping with that failure, in some form or another, ever since…

Strangely, I don’t remember the exchange with Julian weighing on me much just a year later when I got to college — not specifically, anyway. By that point, my feelings for Erica had died down. All of my same hang-ups around being man “enough” were unquestionably still going strong, of course. Hell, they’re still going strong to this day. And, boy oh boy, was I an accident waiting to happen upon my arrival on campus. But when I fast-forward just a handful of years later, it amazes me how my self-image still hadn’t caught up to what I’d become — at least on the outside.

1995 maybe? (photo from the personal Fuckin’ Faggot Archives)

Recently, I stumbled across a picture of myself taken when I was in my mid-twenties. I was stunned in disbelief that the person in the photo was me.

I don’t ever remember looking like that, I thought to myself. How could I have not SEEN what i LOOKED like? How do one’s eyes fail to register something so fundamental, and for YEARS on end?

I’ll tell you how: because it takes a long time — possibly forever — to re-calibrate your sense of who you are when you’re convinced that you’re flawed beyond redemption. I grew up taking it for granted that I was hideous. So, however attractive the person in that photo may have been on the surface, I can tell you that I never felt like that person. I mean, I recognize that it’s me, but it looks almost completely foreign. Without the picture, I wouldn’t have believed that it was me.

When that photo was taken, I wouldn’t exactly say I’d grown into a ladykiller, but let’s just say I’d come a long way from the simp-y high schooler following after a girl and her frozen lemonade cart like a lost puppy. And yet, I can remember feeling almost completely disconnected once it became clear that I was being desired on a regular basis. In my twenties, sensing women’s attraction towards me felt something like being in the eye of a hurricane — it was like I could only perceive the impact by watching trees sway onshore in the distance. I couldn’t feel anything “moving” in the spot where I was standing myself. Which is a fancy way of saying that nothing had changed internally.

Hilariously, by the time I started to settle into some sense that I could accept my “attractiveness” as real, I was in my forties, so I didn’t realize I’d already started to decline physically! But it goes without saying that being desired did nothing to resolve the legion of issues I brought to my relationships: the volatile reactivity, the disorganized attachment style, the jagged oscillations from neediness to cold detachment, the sense of feeling caged and shutting down physically and emotionally mere months after getting together with someone…

All of this, of course, left a trail of hurt, confused partners grappling to fathom how this person they’d gotten together with could go from being consumed by desire for them to virtually non-existent presence in a flash. No amount of external validation brought any resolution to any of that. In fact, putting emphasis on the validation only made everything worse — not just for me, but for anyone who attempted to be intimate with me while I still lacked the awareness to sit still rather than assess my value through being wanted.

Which brings me to the moral of this story…

It’s become fashionable for women over the last decade or so to understand male behavior through the lens of male entitlement — as if men feel that access to women’s bodies is their right. I can understand the temptation to think in these terms. After all, men can afford to view being desired by women as a barometer of their own self-worth. For women, of course, desire comes laden with all sorts of catastrophic-level consequences, to say nothing of the magnitude alone of taking someone into one’s body. But there’s something crucial missing from the picture when we see men as strictly entitled. And this is where Julian comes in handy.

If we look back at Julian’s colorful choice of words, what jumps out is that his was not the behavior of someone with a need to be chosen. Julian had, in fact, already been chosen. Which meant that the urgency of his motivation stemmed from a fear of not being chosen. And this is where it would benefit women to understand the enormity of their role in defining male existence. It’s not because men feel entitled to being desirable if they exhibit certain traits — it’s because we all innately understand that we’ll be chosen by women for exhibiting what women find desirable.

And, whether it’s the alpha guy on YouTube to the suburban nerd who nurses the anguish of his unrequited crush by listening to Weezer, all men dangle over the same existential abyss, where not being chosen is a fate worse than death. In spite of my patches of hopeless limerent attachment, for example, I’ve also gone literal years not giving a flying fuck about being in a relationship. It’s at those times, in fact — when I’m just diligently plugging along — where I’ve felt my most content. It’s also at those times when a relationship will just organically crop up, without my having to pursue a relationship into being.

I’m also a parent now. So, as someone who has contributed to creating life, I feel less of a push to be “chosen” in a literal sense. But even I understand the power of the hardwired internal calculus that all men live by. Let’s ask, for example, why rockstars and hip hop artists feel a need to display themselves surrounded by a bevy of women. Why wouldn’t they just live that way on their own — why do they feel a need to let the rest of us know that they’re in a position to live that way? And why do successful pick-up artists need to prove over and over — to themselves — that they’re capable of convincing women to sleep with them, something they’ve already “succeeded” at hundreds of times?

Trust me, even the guys who can go off and live in a cabin in the woods with nothing but an axe as their companion, or the ones who can put their nose to the grindstone and devote endless hours to their craft without so much as giving a second thought to a relationship, they’re driven by the same primordial need to be viable as the rest of us. Which is why Julian lashed-out with such intensity. He wasn’t lashing-out at me, but at the part of himself that was afraid he, too, might get left behind, marooned in the genetic lottery. Even a girl like Erica had that much power that she could trigger his sense of biological panic.

I’ve often thought that all human achievements won by men were done so in pursuit of female approval. This is hardly an original idea. Whether conscious or not, this need to be stamped as worthy by women is so total, so all-encompassing that it permeates everything we do as men, even when we ourselves are convinced we don’t care. The fine print, however, is that I think it’s wrong to reduce male behavior to “they just want to have sex so that they can produce offspring as much as possible.”

Yes, human males are, at their core, basically peacocks. The feather-baring mechanisms may be more elaborate, but the behaviors themselves aren’t much more complicated. Where we differ, though — and where our desire to be desired must be understood in context — is that above all else, men are defined by a need to be useful. Being “chosen” by women is a proxy for the sense that someone has deemed us worthy of serving a purpose. And that purpose can be served at the level of a single relationship, a family, a community, or within the world at large.

Which is why you so often see men devote themselves to institutions like, say, the mafia or the military — or work, or their art, or the business they’ve built — even at the cost of their own lives, or the ability to connect with partners and children. As long as their purpose is laid-out for them, men will very often just march along. If we’re putting Julian’s behavior in the crudest terms, he was just hoping, on some reflexive level, to tap that pussy. Or maybe he was just keeping his game sharp, practicing his seduction skills. It’s likely that he didn’t see what he was doing as anything more than that.

But I know there was a lot more at stake for him. For whatever reason, the fleeting affections of this high school girl became a referendum on his value. It would be interesting to know how things turned out for Julian, whether he grew into an upstanding man — or at least a guy who’s done his best to be of service. I would be happy to find out that that’s the case. But I hafta say that I do wish I’d gotten my hits in. It would’ve actually done the guy some good — to say nothing of how good it would’ve felt for me.

One of the tragedies of how we conduct ourselves socially in 2024 is that we’ve lost sight of the fact that males often only understand the language of being hit back. By refusing to hit back when necessary, boys get the message that the people around them will let them get away with their excesses. So, by softening our approach to boys in a way that denies their fundamental nature, we’re actually making women and children more vulnerable to male aggression than if we maintained structures for men — and mothers! — to police men under threat of force. And by “force,” I mean that sometimes words are enough.

So, to all the men reading this: the next time some guy feels the need to flex on you because his inner panic is so great that he can’t control himself even when he’s got the upper hand, it might be the right thing to just walk away. But it also might be right to sink your teeth in as far as you can and leave a lasting scar. To make that person think twice before throwing their weight around when it’s not a fair fight. You might be doing both of you — and everyone else — a favor.

Meanwhile, however readily you act — or fail to act, as the case may be — you can bet that both parties will be dealing with the fallout for a long time to come. And the scars you don’t leave by your own hand are the scars that person may yet walk away with anyway.

With love for all,
SRK