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Confessions of an Ex-F*ckboy
If you want to do better, you have to put in the work to unlearn. Here’s why you should.
“Time to heal our women, be real to our women / And if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies / That will hate the ladies that make the babies.” There might not be a more famous line from Tupac’s entire catalog — yet it took me 20 years to fully understand it.
Depending on who you ask, you might hear that I’m a womanizer who manipulates women, or a gentleman who respects women as equals. Both are true. But those truths represent very different points in my life. I love women, but it would be a lie to claim that I’ve always treated them well, whether mentally, sexually, or emotionally.
I didn’t notice my problematic behavior until my early twenties, and even then, I didn’t acknowledge it; I just accepted it and kept doing my thing. When I reached 25, though, I started to connect the dots, and realized my relationships with women weren’t the best, in part because I’d mimicked the actions of the men around me for years.
I apologize to the women of my past; it was never their job to teach me how to treat them. Their lessons did not fall on closed ears.
Many of us had been taught to treat women like possessions, to approach them as challenges. We get jealous if the women we’re dating merely speak to other men, but we expect them to forgive us for actually cheating. We expect them to have a low number of sexual partners, while we rack up a body count longer than Grey’s Anatomy. We don’t want them to need us, yet we want them to listen to everything we say.
Honestly, it’s all bullshit.
And now, I’m aware of the bullshit. If I believe the saying, “If you know better, you do better,” shouldn’t I change on the spot? It’s not that simple. Years of environmental conditioning have embedded this way of thinking too deeply for that. And it bothers me more than I can put into words.
But in order to reverse that conditioning, I had to resist it. My brain works well with lists, so I made a checklist of questions to hold myself accountable, and actually become the change I wanted to see.
