Search Results: the stranger is it real

"I thought dating was going to be the fun part, the easiest part... I was in for a mountain of rejections, but to be a guy I had to get out there...

"No, thanks"...

Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it."...

[There is a] monumental power of female sexuality [that gives us an] immense advantage... over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power... I saw... their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so... effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.

Dating women was the hardest thing I had to do as Ned... I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenceless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armour.

But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armour is borrowed and 10 sizes too big, and beneath it he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't see.

That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Eventually I realised that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/18/gender.bookextracts

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