“All The Women Flirted With Me. That’s To Be Expected.” (Trigger Warning)
Here’s the lens to view things though: Every woman is flirting with you because you’re powerful.
The problem is, you remove that lens, and the truth is that some of those women aren’t flirting with you. Let’s be generous and say that most of them are, but 10% are just being nice.
When you expect to see flirting, everything becomes flirting. Someone making eye contact becomes their bold way of seducing you. Someone’s looking away when you stare at them becomes their shy way of leading you deeper into their boudoir.
When what you expect to see is women wanting to fuck you, well, you can always find evidence that someone’s trying.
And if you are a powerful man, with the ability to make or break their career, and you have this lens that everyone’s secretly trying to fuck you, then there’s a good chance you start trying to fuck them. Which, again, maybe a lot of the women there want you.
But the ones that don’t suddenly wind up with a tongue in their mouth, or your hand on their intimate parts.
And some of them freeze. They freeze because they’re reliving some former trauma, or they freeze because they’re trying to figure out how to tell you “no” without losing the career they so desperately need, or they even freeze just because this is so far out of the line of what they expected that they don’t even know how to react to this.
And if you expect every woman to be into fucking you, you’ll see that very still and silent moment of them, breathlessly savoring what they always wanted.
Except it wasn’t that.
It wasn’t that at all.
Even if, reluctantly, they let you keep their hands there in that intimate place because they do that awful math and decide that “getting assaulted” is better than “being beaten up and assaulted.”
But you don’t see that, because you expected them to fuck you, and that lens transforms a trembling, sobbing woman into a girl who was so very nervous about revealing how much she wanted you.
And that’s the thing: you can be right 95% of the time. Maybe you are that attractive, maybe you are that sexy.
But as a human being with any kind of compassion – are you really okay with raping or molesting one out of every twenty women you’re with?
Or do you double down on the lens because you really want those nineteen women, and that twentieth becomes someone who you’d rather lose behind the distorting fog of the lens of “EVERYONE wants me,” and slowly sell your humanity off one 5% risk at a time?
Look. I get a lot of women flirting with me, and I don’t even vaguely qualify as a celebrity – I’m a sex-blogger with a few thousand fans. I can believe that when you’re on national television, you’d get offers that would blow my mind.
But I keep that firm idea in my head: FLIRTING IS NOT NECESSARILY DESIRE. Even though a lot of the times, honestly, it is.
Because that “not necessarily” becomes vital when you start moving into other equations, such as ACQUIESCENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY ENTHUSIASM and SILENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY APPROVAL.
That “not necessarily” is where the remainder of your humanity lives, when temptation comes knocking. That “not necessarily” is where you avoid that 5% exception, or that 1% exception, or even that .01% exception, because holy fuck, what percentage of women are you comfortable assaulting, shouldn’t it be zero, God I hope it’s zero, please Lord let it be zero.
All the women flirted. And maybe they did.
But it’s what you do with that interpretation that makes you either a human, or a monster.
(Title taken from a quote by Donald Trump, but it could apply to any number of people who wind up getting more fame than they counted on.)