David McElroy

I am angry.

It’s hard for me to admit that. I’ve written in the recent past — here and here — about the reasons for this, so I’m not going to waste time explaining the reasons again.

I spent most of my 45-minute drive home from the office on the phone. As I locked the office door, I made a phone call that I thought would take 60 seconds, but it dragged on and on. As I finally pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant for dinner, I realized that my muscles were tight and my jaw was clenched.

I felt incredibly angry. It wasn’t anger about anything that had just happened. It was more long-repressed anger seeping out. As I turned the car off and sat in the fading twilight for a few moments, I felt a rush of irrational anger and misery.

I wanted to explode. I wanted to cry. I wanted to angrily scream out to ask somebody why life doesn’t work the way I was taught it was supposed to.

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Our relationships with our parents often lay the foundation for what our future romantic relationships will be like, for good or bad. It can take many forms, but we are almost always completely clueless about the connection.

My mother abandoned me when I was a child and I grew up numbing myself to unconscious feelings of being unworthy of love. I ruined a number of romantic relationships and it took me many years to figure out that I was playing out that childhood drama with women I chose to love.

Was I determined to push away anyone who would love me? Or did I choose women who were destined to abandon me? I understand now that I‘m looking for the woman who will give me the right answer when I ask, “Will you abandon me, too?”

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It’s just another random message-board discussion among crude and nasty men. There’s nothing special about it, because it goes on all the time. It’s sleazy and vile guys — old enough to know better — talking with gusto about “banging sluts.”

And every time I see such filth, I am livid.

I ran across yet another example of this on a sports message board late Monday night. It was a three-page thread about which universities of the Southeastern Conference have the “sluttiest” female students. By the standards of such discussions, this one wasn’t among the worst. But the attitude it betrays — that these men believe women are “sluts” to be hunted for their lustful conquest — is far too pervasive.

I am sick of living in a world where this is considered acceptable behavior.

Many men grow up accepting that good guys have as many sexual conquests as possible — and they see the women they conquer as sluts. Even more sickening, many women grow up in a culture that accepts this and tolerates it. They come to accept it as normal.

Worst of all, women knowingly marry these vile creatures and have children with them — pushing this sleazy cycle into another generation.

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