toxic men — 1 explainer, sort of

men, as a category, is too broad. let me narrow it. men of a certain disposition, men with a leased car, men who text the word actually before correcting you on the spelling of your own job title. i have a short list and an even shorter patience.

the list, to be fair, was not made on purpose. it accumulated. items got added the way receipts get added to the wallet i carry — without planning, without sorting, with the vague conviction that the wallet is, somehow, still functioning.

it is 10:38am on a wednesday. i am at my desk in a building i would prefer not to name, with the tab for this draft open behind a spreadsheet that is, technically, not mine to edit. carla is on the third floor at the all-hands. i have, charitably, the rest of the morning before someone wonders what i am writing in a document called “notes_personal_DO_NOT_OPEN.docx”.

writing this from the desk. carla is at the all-hands. i have, charitably, the rest of the morning. let’s go.

i’d like to say i arrived at this draft from a calm place. i did not. i arrived at this draft from a stack of mail i carried, four days ago, into the post office i avoid, and then carried back out, in the same envelope, because the line was long and the woman behind the counter was on the phone and the man in front of me was wearing the kind of jacket that announces itself. the post office i avoided where this draft happened, oddly, is the next section. for now: the disclaimer.

toxic men, the disclaimer

i need to say this before we go further, calmly and only once: this is not a pamphlet. i am not, in this post, mounting a campaign. i am, in this post, writing about a category of behavior i have, in fact, observed — at weddings, at supermarkets, on the third step of a stairwell, in the lobby of my own building. the category is real. the category is not the entire gender. anyone who reads this and concludes otherwise is, frankly, doing the same trick the men i’m describing do, which is to translate the sentence in front of them into a sentence they prefer.

so: the category. toxic men, in the working version i’m going to use here, are men whose patterns — over time, in different rooms, with different audiences — leave the people around them more anxious, more rehearsed, or more apologetic than they started. the keyword is pattern. one man being cranky in a doctor’s office, on a tuesday, in a paper gown, is not a category. that man is a man having a tuesday. the category requires repetition.

some of the longer treatment of the related tactic — the calm denying, the reframing, the rewriting of evidence — already lives in the longer post on gaslighting and other things my ex insists did not happen, and i would point at it now, before we get into specifics, so that the specific can rest on top of the general. the general is the manipulation. the specific, today, is who tends to do it more often, in the rooms i’ve been in.

i also want to say, for the record and only once: this is not a list of crimes. this is a list of habits. some of the habits are inconvenient. some are draining. a few cross over into the territory the related earlier piece on a certain kind of narcissist boss who runs a meeting like a stage tries to map, with names changed and the same boss, anonymously, on every floor. that piece overlaps with this one. the overlap is the man.

HT6 says coffee is achievement. tea is wet leaves. i bring this up because it is the smallest, dumbest example of the pattern i’m trying to describe. a toxic man, in my limited evidence, will hear a hot take like that and decide, on the spot, that you are wrong about it, in a way that requires you to defend a joke about coffee for fifteen minutes. that is not a debate. that is the room shrinking. that is the disclaimer. the disclaimer is: the size of the topic does not predict the size of the man’s response. the response is the data.

the post office i avoided where this draft happened, oddly

so. the post office. i don’t go. i mean that in the structural sense. i avoid the post office in the way other men, of the structured-opinion variety, avoid being wrong on a tuesday. i have a short list of red envelopes in the unopened mail pile that have been there since february, and the post office is, theoretically, where i would resolve them. i do not resolve them. i have, instead, a system. the system is: tomorrow.

four days ago, however, i had to go. there was a certified letter slip on the door. the slip used serif font. HT28, i thought, briefly. the taxman sends letters in serif font. except this one was not from the taxman. this one was from the landlord. let’s get to the landlord. the landlord is, in fact, the next section. i’m getting there.

at the post office, in the line, i ended up behind a man. white shirt, leased-car keychain, the kind of haircut a barber gives you when he has decided what you should look like before you sat down. the man was on the phone. the man was, on the phone, telling someone — i could not see the someone, the someone was, mercifully, audio-only — that they were “overreacting, again”. then he laughed. then he said “no, it’s fine, it’s fine, you’re fine” in the tone you use when you are not, in fact, telling someone they are fine.

the woman behind the counter was, separately, on her own phone, dealing with what i later understood to be a question about a parcel that did not, in this universe, exist. the man in front of me was telling someone they were overreacting about a parcel-adjacent topic. these were, somehow, different conversations.

i stood there for eleven minutes. i counted. eleven is the number i always count to, which is the number from that older investigation, which is the number of times you can be told a thing did not happen before you believe the thing did not happen. eleven is, evidently, also the number of minutes a leased-car man will spend on the phone, in a public line, telling a woman that her concerns are not concerns. i left, mail intact, envelope still unmailed, the certified letter slip still in my pocket. the man, when i left, was still on the phone. the parcel that did not exist was still being adjudicated. the post office had become, briefly, a stage.

i wrote the lede for this post on the walk back. the post office where i did not, technically, post anything is, structurally, where this draft started. the seventh microwave at home knows nothing about it. the unopened mail pile is, as a result, exactly one envelope larger than it was on monday. it is fine. it is fine. you are fine.

tom would have a list, mine has the landlord on it

i ran this, mentally, past tom. i did not call tom. i never call tom. tom owns a house. i rent. tom drives a volvo whose seats are configurable in roughly fourteen postures. tom has a pension that, when described, made me feel like a man who had been doing his finances inside the seventh microwave. tom has a structured opinion about everything, including the dinner-party patriarchs of frasier crane’s living room, which tom rates higher than i do because tom and i disagree, on principle, about most things made of furniture.

tom’s structured opinion, on this topic, would be that a list of toxic men needs criteria. tom would make a spreadsheet. tom would name columns. tom would call them “indicators”. tom does this. tom is the friend you do not invite to the kind of evening where the conversation is allowed to wander, because tom does not allow conversations to wander; tom guides them, calmly, the way a man guides a cart in a parking lot — toward the corral, against the wind, with the exact amount of effort the corral requires.

i, meanwhile, have a list with one name on it that is not a name. it is a role. the role is: the landlord.

my landlord, this morning, sent me a text. the text said “hey, the boiler guy will swing by between 9 and 5, you can leave the key under the mat if you’re out, no worries either way”. the boiler guy did not swing by. the boiler guy never swings by. there is no boiler guy. there has not, on inspection, been a boiler guy in any of the four windows that have already passed. and yet, every six to eight weeks, the same text. no worries either way.

i don’t believe this rises to villainy. i believe it rises to a category. the category is men who have decided you are an inconvenience and are negotiating around you in real time, calmly, while telling you it is no problem. the leased-car man at the post office is in this category. the landlord is in this category. tom, on his good days, is not — tom is direct, tom is exhausting, tom is correct in ways that bruise. tom is not in the category. tom is, in fact, the structural reason the category is visible. you can only see the category if you have known a man like tom, who is not in it.

the men in the lobby, briefly, anonymously

my building has a lobby. the lobby has, on any given morning, two to four men in it. these men are not, individually, toxic. some of them are kind. some of them are tired. one of them, the older one, holds the door reliably. another, who i think works in finance, says “morning, chief” in a way i have, after eight months, decided is sincere. the lobby is mostly fine.

but on the days the lobby is not fine, it is not fine in a recognizable way. there is, on those days, a man — never the same man, and always, somehow, the same man — who is on the phone, loudly, to a woman who is not in the lobby. he is calmly explaining that she has misunderstood. he is calmly explaining that he never said the thing she remembers him saying. he is calmly explaining that the schedule, which they had, last week, agreed on, was not actually agreed on, and that her memory is, in any case, “really bad about dates lately”.

CALMLY. IS. THE. PART. THAT. DOES. IT.

that is the marker. not the volume. the calm. real disagreements, in my limited evidence, have heat. the toxic kind, the kind i’m describing, comes in at room temperature. it is the same temperature regardless of what is happening on the other end of the phone. the man can be standing in a lobby, in a city, with a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other, telling a woman that she is, again, remembering things wrong, and the temperature in his voice will not move. that flatness is the data.

i mention my ex, who now lives, i believe, with someone who owns a volvo. not just any volvo — a specific one, with the kind of seats that adjust in fourteen ways. i mention this only because it haunts me, in equal proportion, the volvo and the seats. i don’t know if the volvo guy is, on phone calls, calm in the way the lobby men are calm. i suspect he is. men with leased cars often are. the man who calls, on my own voicemail, has been calm for eight months running. the voicemail is full. the voicemail has been full for eight months. the calm is, in his case, a function of the voicemail being full. i don’t pick up. he doesn’t escalate. we have a kind of stalemate. it is, technically, working.

verdict — the toxic men are men, the toxicity is the men

carla just walked the corridor. cursor blinked. i looked appropriately occupied. that is two-for-two on plausible deniability before lunch, which is the metric i’ve decided to keep.

the third yoga mat, for the record, is still under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. it has nothing to do with this post. i mention it because it is, in its way, the patient counter-argument to everything in the previous five sections. the yoga mat does not get calmer when challenged. it just sits there, doing one thing, badly, for years. there is a category for that too. the category is me. but that is, technically, a different post.

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