Homme Fatale: The Gay Emosogynist (Part 2)

The past couple of years, I had a pattern of dating boys for several weeks without having sex with them. My friend K thinks it is an abomination. Faeries have sex for sustenance and it’s a known fact. However, I may have unconsciouly found that hearts may have been more appetizing than schubligs.

One night stands are healthier by comparison (so long as you only do safe, of course). If nobody hears from anyone after the debauchery, the message is clear. The game of the efficiently raptorial womanizer (and its parallel--the average horny faerie) ends after the one nighter. However, the emosogynist, straight or otherwise, has a completely different set of rules. Compared to regular predators, emosogynists have evolved advanced culinary tastes and learned how to marinate, season their prey in cinammon and cook them over slow fire.

I met a model a couple of years back. After downing some buckets of beer, we strolled along baywalk, stole a few kisses and talked until morning. The next time we saw each other, he brought me siomai. Then packed lunch. Then a pink teddy. Then he brought me to his school to meet his teachers. It only took another couple of weeks before he introduced me to his family as one of his "best friends". We went out, watched movies, the whole nine yards. Well, call it 8 yards because I never slept with the dude. One day I decided he wasn’t for me. Clearly it felt good to be liked but it got confusing when I couldn't like the person back no matter how hard I tried or how everyone else seems to like the person but me.

I met a sweet fresh grad a few weeks after. The boy chose to accept a job offer an hour and a half away from his work so we could see each other more often. But I was gone after a month. A very similar story happened with an IT guy. I just stopped answering his texts and phone calls. Obviously he ended up bewildered. Honestly, I may have been just as baffled. Similar story with… you get the point. Repetition was necessary before I could recognize any pattern.

I wasn’t always just dating boys without sex. A boy has got to eat. Hot skinhead boy who picked me up twice (from an earlier blog entry) observed loudly that I was the dating kind. His first sentence was, “tara sa Eurotel” to which I promptly replied, “wag muna.” I could be an obnoxious kaltok-deserving Maria Clara if I wanted to. So we dated for an hour and headed out to Eurotel anyway. I was the dating kind, not deliberately sleazy, but not deliberately insipid either. A little more fatal.

Irina Aleksander writes about the L’Homme Fatale in an article in The New York Observer and describes the emosogynist as:

…Often the creative type, he projects a deceptive vulnerability, while maintaining an appealing confidence. He’s usually not the best-looking guy in the room, but he is the smartest; he turns these traits to his advantage, playing up the contrast with the typical hot guy or womanizer (physical inferiority, emotional evolvement). His courtship begins with a rushed sense of intimacy and, yet, a disarming lack of forward physical advances; a first date might involve a game of Scrabble or perhaps a cup of tea; his target usually leaves wondering if in fact it was a date at all. And yet the story always has the same ending—he grows distant, stops calling and eventually disappears with little explanation, if any.

The emosogynist is not necessarily aware of the emotional havoc he can wreak. It is this lack of awareness of his effect highlights the damage even more. And this lack of awareness extends to the emosogynist's incognizance of what he wants. In my case, I was not sure what I wanted; getting someone to fall for me was one way I could find out if I could reciprocate it to that person. It was more convenient, less painful and utterly selfish. The common adage is “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” That ditz Celine Lopez quips that you can hate the player and not the game. What is all this hating going to accomplish, anyhoo hullabahoo? The L’Homme Fatale is not even necessarily aware of his part in the game; or if he’s aware of any game at all, for that matter.

 Irina’s article goes full circle and takes us to a more sympathetic view of the emosogynist:

“The Homme Fatale is a different, possibly more modern condition than a sociopath—he is not as aware of his actions. My understanding is that sociopaths are more clever and conniving. Maybe this is my personal bias, but I think the Homme Fatale is a slightly more sympathetic character,” said James. “The empathy is there, but people who do the most harm are people who don’t know what they want, and Hommes Fatales don’t know what they want.”

And unlike a sociopath, James described feeling a genuine sense of remorse. He’s been trying to change.

“I don’t think you can ever really shed it completely, but as with any sort of psychological problem, it can be made better,” said James. “The first step to reforming one’s actions is to become aware of the pattern you’ve laid out.”

There is the possibility that there are many closeted gay guys that go emosogynist on women because they cannot truly conquer the cunt. Frankly, emosogyny may simply be about men giving women a taste of their own medicine and faeries got into the mix somehow. Whether the emosogynist is straight or gay has become highly immaterial; the affliction touches beyond the sexual and dangerously pokes at the fundamentals of infatuation, emotional connection and love.