Rejection: Fiction

“It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won’t admit how strongly you invite it.”

The Feminist’s agender QPOC friend criticizes him for his emotionally taxing behavior. This establishes pity as a prominent symbol for failure. Whenever The Feminist is rejected by a woman, he seeks out his friend’s pity as a consolation prize, complaining about their failure while also claiming to be above it because it contradicts his stated values as a feminist.

“He’s old enough to know that relationships don’t guarantee happiness, that the source of his pain is a patriarchal fantasy, agonizingly elaborated over decades, about love and sex as the basis of fulfillment. But he still feels he cannot be happy until this pain stops, and it will not stop until he has an experience of love that will at last disillusion him.”

The Feminist reaches the wisdom that liberates him from the imperative of seeking relationships. Ideally, this insight should stop The Feminist from seeing love and sex as a reward he is entitled to receive. Instead, Tulathimutte gives this insight an ironic outcome: The Feminist reasons that he should have an experience of love first to prove his insight true.

“I would have died for them if they’d asked, I would have thrown my bleeding body on the barricades of the patriarchy, and they would have let me do it, indifferently accepting my death as their due, with not a punctum of guilt as they go off to bed and wed my murderers. That is the long con, their big lie. By now my bachelorhood, and yours, cannot be ascribed to circumstance or bad luck, only injustice. We must reject it.”

The Feminist uses militaristic terms to underscore his argument that he has been unjustly oppressed by women, comparing himself to a partisan dying “on the barricades.” This marks the height of his distorted thinking as The Feminist co-opts the tenets of feminism to antagonize women. He turns feminism into an oxymoronic value system, representing the opposite of what it originally stood for. The choice of metaphor also foreshadows The Feminist’s eventual descent into violence.