I’ve had a bad couple days, so I’ve decided that there’s exactly one solution: find an idiot on the Internet and call them stupid until I feel better. Today’s idiot comes to us courtesy of the PJ Lifestyle, offering up 7 Mistakes Women Make With Men.

Do you want to know what the mistakes are? A lot of them boil down to “treating him like a human being!”

I’m puzzled listening to my female friends tell me they don’t understand men. This is like a rocket scientist telling you she can’t figure out how a flush toilet works.

Spoken like someone who has never tried to date a man.

Seriously, men are fully capable of every bit of “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” “I totally want to date you but I’m still not over my ex, wait, you took that seriously, of course I don’t want to date you,” “if we have casual sex that means you’re in love with me, right?”, “I want to be poly, wait, no, I just found my One True Love and now we’re monogamous!” confusing-ass self-contradictory bullcrap that women are.

You see, occasional incomprehensibility is not limited to one gender or another, but is a universal trait of all human beings in a romantic context. I’m pansexual. We know these things.

There’s actually no wrong answer [about when to have sex] per se. If the guy is really clicking well enough with you, he’s probably going to stick around regardless of whether it happens on the first date or your wedding day.

If there is not a wrong answer, then it is not a mistake, PJ Lifestyle! I mean, yes, it IS a mistake to have sex with people on the fourth date if you only want to have sex within a committed relationship, but that is not a mistake women make about men, that is a mistake people make about people. (See my earlier statement re: men being complicated.)

Now with men, if you study cultures around the world, contrary to what you hear about gender being a “social construct,” you’ll find that “masculinity” revolves around the same basic traits everywhere.

It does. Really. So, um, the Wodaabe? And Aristophanes arguing that gay men are the manliest because they love masculine things?

A) Being productive or having a lot of resources
B) Being capable of fighting
C) Being courageous and tough
D) Being able to attract women
E) Having status

Success myth, men as violent, men as violent, men as hypersexual, success myth. Don’t you just love it when people validate your theories?

Speaking of empirical validation, I just told a dude that he was incapable of fighting and lacking in productive resources, and he said that since he wasn’t playing Civilization at the moment that all seemed rather immaterial. Which just shows you that insulting people properly takes empathy– you have to find the bits that they, personally, are insecure about, not the bits everyone called “he” is insecure about. Are men more likely than women to be insecure about their toughness or their status? Probably. But it isn’t universal.

Bitter, man-hating women aren’t any more attractive to the opposite sex than angry misogynistic men are to women.

Dude. As a feminist, I must say, I have never compared men to motherfucking flush toilets.

Men are not as comfortable with their emotions as women. Typically, we don’t use our emotions as often or as fully as women, we don’t get in as many emotional situations, and we feel extremely uncomfortable with the idea of crying or getting choked up.

So is this one of those universal non-gender-construct things? Because let me inform you that there is a fuckton of manly weeping in the Iliad.

Again, this is probably true throughout our culture: men will tend to be less likely to cry and be in contact with their emotions than women. But is this because men have manly-man man feelings, or because many men get very early negative conditioning that if they cry people will make fun of them or punch them? Rhetorical.

Depending on their mental state, there are a lot of women who can break into tears if a waiter brings them the wrong kind of salad dressing. But to a man, a woman crying over something he did means that he FAILED as a man to protect her and worse yet, he did the opposite and inflicted pain on someone he cares about.

Okay, look, if you’re breaking into tears because a waiter brings you the wrong kind of salad dressing, that’s not “lol women are so overemotional lol hysteria lol,” that’s a sign that something is seriously wrong. Could be depression, could be grief, could be severe PMS, could be stress, could be an eating disorder, but the one thing it is not is normal. And when your partner is going through something seriously wrong, the right answer is not “RARRRGH I AM MANLY MAN I BEAT UP THE MAMMOTH OF YOUR FEEEEEEELINGS“, the answer is to listen and provide support and maybe recommend a therapist.

Also the title of the section is “manipulate his emotions,” but as far as I can tell this entire section is about how you shouldn’t have emotions yourself.

It’s also why men tend to do something else that women really hate: just disappearing instead of ending a relationship properly. 

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA YOU THINK ONLY MEN DO THAT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *wipes tears* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Even if it doesn’t SEEM tough and they do make a lot of changes, don’t be surprised if the man eventually feels emasculated and backslides.

…Or, you know, people are really quite happy that they don’t have parents anymore and are annoyed to suddenly find their partners fulfilling that role. That works too.

Many women will just discount [nice men] right off the bat because they think they’re weak, boring, fake, etc. 

You know, it is possible to be nice AND weak, boring, and fake. They’re not mutually contradictory. I always get pissed off when people say “Oh, you should date someone nice,” because I spent my first three boyfriends dating people who were nice and whom I wasn’t attracted to or interested in as people. You know what? Being nice is not sufficient for a relationship. They deserved better than someone who felt obligated to date them.

Things that are SCREAMINGLY OBVIOUS for a woman may blow past a man like a frisbee in a hurricane.

Once again, I’m the one that hates men?

Honestly, I’m not sure if men or women come off worse in the next paragraph. Men, for instance, can’t remember their girlfriends’ eye colors and aren’t interested in what their girlfriends are concerned about; meanwhile, women are only concerned with fashion and their paranoia that their boyfriends will leave them.

You’ll probably never see a man write off a woman as not even worth having a conversation with because she had scuffed shoes or because she doesn’t have a lot of money.

Look, dudes, I want you to think for five minutes here. Do you really want people who are shallow enough that they don’t want to date you because you have scuffed shoes to actually date you? If they’re filtering themselves out of your dating pool, that is a good thing!

As I hate to leave everyone with negativity, I would like to replace these 7 Mistakes Men Make About Women with 7 Mistakes People Make About People. Now with 100% less fail!

1) Sleep with someone before you feel comfortable.
2) Act insensitively around things they feel insecure about.
3) Hate people of any gender.
4) Not support your partners when they’re going through a hard time.
5) Try to change people.
6) Believe that no good partners of the appropriate gender exist.
7)  Overanalyze, be unable to take interest in your partner’s life, or not remember basic details about your partner.