This week, we'll be running an essay a day about the state of being men and women. Welcome to Sex Offender Week-it's just like Shark Week, but without sharks and with angry blog comments!

Hey man. Got a question for you. Have you ever, as a red-blooded hetero dude, had sex before? Yeah? Pretty boss, right?! Well, you should hug a feminist! If you happen to be dating one, this should be pretty easy. (Unless you've been a dumbass to her recently; and hey, we've all been there.)
 
Now, if you're thinking, feminist? Hey fuck that noise, I ain't huggin' any hairy-legged broad for nothing, my main man, then you should probably stop reading right now, as there is no hope for you. But I would wager you are not thinking this.

You probably even voted for Obama! Or, if you voted McCain (and do you regret it if you did?) you did so from a principled, Libertarian-leaning concern for the "free market" and on social issues you are "pretty chill." In fact, you are probably thinking, har har, nobody actually thinks that feminism is about burning bras and smashing the superstructure of male, white, corporate oppression any more. Get real, man. (Though believe it-those bros do still exist.)
 
No, see, the person I'm talking to here has a separate problem. One that he probably doesn't even particularly know (or would even think) about. It's a thing that most of us probably learned from a muppet or a preschool teacher or our mothers and grandmothers or fathers and grandfathers. It's that thing about having your cake and eating it too.
 
Because really, for our purposes? You love feminism! You do! You think that it's great that a woman can still be a proper lady without making some bullshit feints to "chastity" and "purity" before marriage. You surely think that the (molester-enabling Nazi) Pope should stay out of your bedroom. You don't think that sex is purely for procreation. (You are in fact often scared shitless about procreation!) You're even probably pretty happy that women aren't chained to the home anymore, that they can go out and, like, make money and have lives.
 
But still. While you're happy about the freedom that men and women our age have to "hook-up" in as many possible configurations as there are imaginations and willing participants, there's something a bit off. You are missing something, something coherent with a certain fundamental part of the thing that allows us this freedom. Now don't worry! I'm not gonna make you read Andrea Dworkin or nothing! This isn't gonna be some women's studies/psychology/sociology seminar that you're gonna wanna sleep through. It's just a blog post on some hipster handbook. If you can make it through some dude telling you who to pick on your "fantasy team," you can make it through this.
 
The crux of the matter is that while you are out there enjoying all this freedom, you're not really — if you be completely honest with yourself — affording the same to the ladies out there. You do things like convince yourself that every time you sleep with a girl, it's her first time. I'm not going to go into some long diatribe about Christianity and the fetishization of the virgin, but you know what I mean. It just sits weird if you know or think about her being with another dude. You put it out of your head.
 
Now this is a pretty tame example, because it gets worse. Like, take a dude who's dating a girl but it "hasn't gotten serious yet." They're "just talking" and "have hooked up a few times." Dude is free as a bird, right? He's sleeping with an ex, flirting with some ladies at the bar, just hanging out, being a dude. But introduce to him even the idea, the unsubstantiated, perhaps wholly illusory idea that this girl he's just talking to is sleeping with someone else. His stomach turns. He gets visibly, perhaps violently, perhaps morosely upset. The word "whore" may start to crop up in bar stool conversations.
 
Okay, so I am maybe being pretty hard on Theoretical Dude. Who am I to sit up on my high horse and create this guy just to harsh on him so? Fair enough. And you're right — I shouldn't just focus on these types of situations, because it's more pernicious than this. So, I'll give you an example from my own often sordid, usually mundane, mostly idiotic experience with being a dude who is into chicks.
 
Freshman year of college, I think first semester, the autumn leaves and the rugby shirts and all that bullshit. And these guys start canvassing Newark, trying to come up with some warm bodies for this group they just started. I take a flier, as I have this thing about taking fliers from being a rock bro and "trying to support the scene, man." The group is called M.A.R.S. — the Men Against Rape Society. And stupid little emo-listening 18-year-old me is incensed. Why, I think, if they have this group, and name it this, they are setting up some false equivalency [or some other term from my intro Philosophy classes that I was horribly misusing]. It's like saying that any guy who doesn't join this group is a rapist!! Plus, they are probably just doing this to pick up chicks, anyway.
 
Now, some of you may think that idiot 18-year-old me is on to something here. Weren't they calling all other dudes rapists? The problem here is the Tea Parties. You know, those silly bumpkins with their hand-scrawled signs about Obama being a socialist space alien. Remember how, when these people got accused of racism, they claimed that the accusers were really just obsessed with race? That race had nothing to do with it? That they were being victimized and defamed? George Bush was a uniter, not a divider. Rush Limbaugh often claims to be beyond race, unable to see color. (While he's saying Donovan McNabb can't play quarterback because he's black, LOL.)
 
What 18-year-old me was doing was saying was I can't possibly be a misogynist, a rapist. In fact, in [not actually at all, and if so, very subtly and subtextually] calling me such, you have actually wronged me. This is what I thought, and this playing at some reverse-victimization was actually doing pretty much what the teabaggers are doing. I was saying that I couldn't possibly be sexist or misogynist because I just didn't think in those terms. I was pure.
 
Oh course, I was an idiot. I was raised Irish/German Catholic in the United States of America. How could I not have been some weird sexist and/or possible rapist? And talking to you here, bro, I am not making some claim to ultimate, enlightened gender-issue purity of thought. I still have weird feelings sometimes. It's ingrained. But the thing I had to do was admit it to myself. After that, all you can do is recognize when you are not thinking correctly (because you are not!) and work on it. Every day, you have to work on it.