How to Date Men When You Hate Men
CBC Books | | Posted: January 15, 2019 4:57 PM | Last Updated: January 18, 2019
Blythe Roberson
From New Yorker and Onion writer and comedian Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men is a comedy philosophy book aimed at interrogating what it means to date men within the trappings of modern society.
Blythe Roberson's sharp observational humor is met by her open-hearted willingness to revel in the ugliest warts and shimmering highs of choosing to live our lives amongst other humans.
She collects her crushes like ill cared-for pets, skewers her own suspect decisions, and assures readers that any date you can mess up, she can top tenfold. And really, was that date even a date in the first place? (From Flatiron)
From the book
I think about men all the time. About how they, individually (Donald Trump) and as a group, are oppressing me. And about how they, individually (Timothée Chalamet) and as a group, are very hot. And also: how spending so much time thinking about how they, as a group, are hot … is probably oppressing me. Unsure what else to do about it, I've written this book.
How to Date Men When You Hate Men is a comedy philosophy book about what dating and loving are like now, in an era that we thought was the end of patriarchy (but we now know is at least five hundred years away from that) and at the beginning of an age where robots do all our dating for us. Honestly: it often sucks, and it's hard to know if it's because of my personality, the guy's personality, or thousands of years of inequality stemming from gender imbalances created by plow farming. This book is loosely structured to mirror the arc of a relationship, from crushes to flirting, dating and encountering problems, getting serious, breaking up, being single, and … making art about it all! Ah, yes: the human life span.
"DO YOU REALLY HATE ALL MEN???" ask you, Bill Maher. I don't! Some of my closest friends are men! I have, and love, many male family members: all of my siblings are boys, and there are seemingly thousands of them (there are five). And of course, there are men who I have kissed and cared about or who I am dying to kiss and care about. Almost universally, I still feel fondly toward any guy I've ever been romantically interested in or involved with. These men are funny and interesting. Some are really kind! Many are hot! Quite a few still to this day very generously fave my social media content. To paraphrase the suffragettes in Mary Poppins: though I adore men as individuals, I believe that as a group they're systemically oppressing women.
From How to Date Men When You Hate Men by Blythe Roberson ©2019. Published by Flatiron.