“But when she said no, I put it back,” he said,
almost convinced,
his eyes glittering with an island of newly found hope
in an ocean of what one would expect to be regret and shame,
but was mostly
the realisation of the bad luck of getting caught.
He spoke about his penis
like people speak about things
they're accused of misplacing.
He spoke of her pause before the refusal
like it was a waiting period
he could utilise to win back a business deal.
He spoke of consent and of abuse
like they were metaphors:
subjective,
negotiable,
open to interpretation.
What can I say?
He was a veteran in the metaphorical department.
And like the weather gods at the meteorological department,
it was barely a surprise
that he would fail at his job rather spectacularly.
It's funny how we've been brought up
with an image of what monsters should look like:
loud,
ruthless,
unhinged.
The more I see humans,
the more convinced I become
that the worst of them
come in soft, tamed, well-behaved skins.
You need your prey to like you
before you can become its predator.
Apparently,
that is where evolution peaked.
He wasn't just another man.
What life would that even be?
He was a man of ethics,
of principles,
of revolutions.
A gentleman
drowning in a sea of women
tarnished by grains and specks
of uncouth penises
reeking of unbothered testosterone.
A gentleman
who had called me a misogynist
three weeks earlier,
who spoke of my arrogance
in arguing with a woman,
of my refusal to accept
that every last man
on the face of the planet
should be apologetic
and ashamed
of his very existence,
as though disagreement
were a misdemeanour,
and refusing to surrender
my sensibilities
to somebody else's dogmatic definition
of feminism
were a serious offence;
one that demanded exile.
As though an everyday disagreement
could be turned into a ticking bomb
of character definition,
one that would culminate
in the assassination
of the very character,
its identity,
and every life
caught inside its blast radius.
And don't we all know,
gentlemen don't rape.
Because how could they?
They're soft-spoken.
Agreeable.
Pleasant to talk to.
They feel good to be around.
Imagine if everything
that seemed and felt nice
were incapable of carrying disease.
How poorly
would a sexually transmitted disease
feel?
And who was I,
an oral cancer,
to judge him,
a fucking genital germ?
He was a gentleman
with a gentle penis
and gentler intentions.
Every time he touched a woman
with cheap liquor beneath his breath,
it was drunk affection.
Every time he described
his journey across the terrain of an unclothed woman's flesh
to another,
he was merely being a flirt.
Every time he pulled his penis out of his pants
in front of an unwilling woman,
it was just an error in punctuation.
And isn't that the trick?
We have become so accustomed to manicured manliness
that we mistake sheep's clothing for character.
The gentleman's voice is soft.
His hands are clean.
His vocabulary is polished.
His metaphors are well behaved.
Only the verbs misbehave.
Consent becomes a metaphor.
Violation becomes a misunderstanding.
Persistence becomes desire.
And a woman's refusal becomes an inconvenience to be negotiated.
Perhaps that is how a predator survives
in a world that insists
on recognising monsters by their manners.
He doesn't need to look monstrous.
He only needs to sound vulnerable.
And perhaps that is why the language matters.
Because once you crowd the noun with enough adjectives,
people stop asking what the verb did.
That is the genius of manicured manliness:
the sentence looks clean.
Even when the body does not.
Especially when the body does not.
And somewhere between the two,
a gentleman has learned how to call his crime a metaphor.
