Women Are Valuing Their Time and Men are Mad About It.

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5 Feb 2024

In one of the most recent examples, a man threw up a gif of the cartoon character Caillou throwing a temper tantrum into a post titled "You People Lately" on a subreddit for the popular note-taking app Notion. The gif was the sole content of the post, and while it was easily speculated that this was in response to the outcry of displeasure in Notion's most recent, overhyped announcement, the post itself didn't clarify.

It was simply an internet man complaining about people complaining on the internet.
Very original, I know.

I replied to the post with "What an insightful post." and was almost immediately met with a "Says the person who sells their body for $30?"

The problem with this man's response wasn't even his attempt to troll or his complete disregard that my profile reads that I have a $30 DMS fee, or even the attempt to discredit me for being part of the sex work community. None of those things truly bother me; his response was a childish retort because he's emotionally stunted, my body sells for whatever I feel like on the day I share photos of it because it is my body and I can do as I like with it. I'm not ashamed of that, nor should any woman be ashamed of taking ownership of her body.

The problem is that men see women gatekeeping their time and immediately revert to the childhood stage of being told they can't have a cookie before dinner and being completely unable to regulate the overwhelming emotion of frustration because their brains aren't quite big enough to comprehend why that might be bad for them.

Men can't stand the idea of women not making themselves completely available to them 24/7, even if they don't particularly want something from the woman at the moment. They balk at the idea that a woman should ever be anything less than fully and freely available to them.

This is a pretty tame example of the way men try to criticize that I charge them for a personal conversation in my private messages, even when I often engage in public conversations on Reddit or other social media that they are welcome to participate in (not troll) as they wish and as I have the time and energy to engage. The kickback on Fetlife (a website dedicated to the kinky and bdsm-inclined) for starting my profile with a warning that no one (not even just men) should be DMing me without a non-kink purpose unless they'd paid my conversation fee.

The response from men has been continual attempts to paint me as "predatory" for refusing private conversations with them, to berate me for being "so full of myself" or "thinking I'm that special." I don't see myself as so special that people should have any reason to have to DM me. After all, is it not the people who reach out to me unprompted that see me as some kind of special to want to DM me at all? If they don't see me as special enough to pay for the privilege of privately chatting with them, they merely have to not DM me and find someone happy to privately message them about kink for free. Those women--those people--do exist. I am just not one of them.

And yet... men act as though I'm requiring the blood of three firstborn children to speak to me; something which I don't ask them to do. I don't reach out to men and beg them, ask them, or encourage them to DM me if they aren't willing to pay for it. I don't need them to. But if men--or anyone--wishes to engage with me in that way, then I require that they value my time by paying for it.

I'm not the only one. Ask any woman you know if she has ever been harassed or berated for refusing to talk to a man, online or in person. Even if she isn't charging for it-- men abhor the idea that women are not freely available to them, even for conversation. Much in the same way that Boomers overwhelmingly dislike Millenials and other generations wearing headphones in their presence. The problem is the sense of entitlement to other people's time and energy, and most heavily, women's. The moment women begin to value their time and realize that they don't have to allow men to take it freely is the moment when men overwhelmingly decide that women are no longer of benefit to them, highlighting the objectification and dehumanization that occurs to women daily on a much larger scale.

So here's your reminder: women are entitled to their boundaries, respect, and gatekeeping their time, energy, and wisdom. Women are entitled to charge for those things. Women are entitled to say no. Men are not entitled to any of them without meeting the boundaries and expectations that individual women have set to receive them.

Here's the bop to listen to whenever you start to forget.