On Softboys™ and Projecting

Softboy [sɑft bɔɪ] noun, 1. similar to a fuckboy but without the cocky attitude. The softboy will butter a girl up by appealing to her emotions and showing a “sensitive” side long enough for her to sleep with him, whether or not he actually cares about her or not. -Urban Dictionary

Ok so I show up at the poetry slam like I always do, wade through the cesspool of unchecked ego and unresolved trauma to bask in a blissful 3 minutes and 30 seconds of my own raw humorless vulnerability. And don’t get me wrong, I love this shit. These are my people after all. But when I get off the stage, some boy with cuffed pants and a beard less connected than my phone to the shitty WiFi in this black box theater tells me he thinks I’m so interesting and would love to pick my brain about some pseudo-intellectual 2am Twitter bullshit. And so, I entertain him, partly because I’m bored, but mainly because underneath all this black femme cynicism, I really do love talking about corny shit, even to the eager oversimplifies and not nice Nice Guys™.

Cut to about 3 months later, after my self deprecation isn’t funny or deep anymore and he’s gotten a couple good songs out of the 3 times we’ve had sex, Owen or Patrick or James (or any other white boy name that should enable my fight or flight, but his hair was nice) tells me I’ve changed. For the next 2 weeks he assures me how much he values our relationship and regularly hits me up for validation, advice, or any other conjugation of unpaid emotional labor. He tells me he has never met a mind like mine and not to forget him when I’m famous as if I haven’t already forgotten him right now.

And I don’t know when I stopped being a person and started being a mind, but when you’re a 20 something poet who looks like an art hoe even in pajamas, you come to expect these kinds of gross assumptions. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m almost uncomfortably used to being used as a muse for mxn who value my art and perspective more than they value me. Now of course, to value me in the way that counts, they would first have to put in the effort to know me in the first place, but because I’m shit at asking for what I need, here’s what usually happens:

1. Softboy™ sees my expressionless face and mistakes me for a vessel

2. Softboy™ challenges himself to fix my unbroken heart with his magical lofi dick

3. Sexually transmitted accountability

4. Softboy™ realizes I am virtually unchanged by his being here and is offended by the very thought he didn’t change my life

5. Softboy™ goes on his way with a moleskine thick with my performative complexity

It’s pretty easy to get burned up when you exist as cannon fodder for someone else’s self proclaimed revolutionary art. And because it’s 2017, and we all know the manic pixie dream narrative is tired and reeks of a certain unflushable misogyny in even the cleanest masculine toilets, these mxn, with their watered down perspective and mediocre execution, get surprisingly creative with how best to dehumanize you. Lucky for them, a walled-up guarded bitch like me finds it marginally easier to lean into other folx’ projections of who I am than be vulnerable in any substantial way.

So why do I do this, right? Why do I let them leech off my waning life force and fleeting youth? What could I possibly gain from giving these mxn access to my so called unparalleled creative energy? Well for starters, I’ve always wanted to be a thespian and this is some of the most quality hands-on free acting training my poor ass can afford. But mainly, there’s just something so satisfying about watching mxn slowly hate their own ideas almost as much as I hate their ideas.

You see, when a softboy™ decides what (not who) I am, he becomes some shitty bootleg fortune teller dreaming up all the ways he can love my flaws and romanticize my emotional apathy. Perhaps it’s the unholy marriage of sadism and white savior complexes, or the maybe it’s a complete inability to view femmes as multidimensional humans, that contribute to the frequency at which this shit happens to me. But either way, at this point, I am so fluent in the language of being troped I could write choose your own adventures novels about all the ways I have disappointed disappointing mxn simply by existing outside of their ideas of me.

Although being a blank canvas can be a truly liberating experience, it, like all things, is really only healthy if all parties present have agreed to be a part of it. I’ve had to learn how often and in what ways I can lend myself to what feels like the least appreciated charity of inspiring uninspiring mxn without completely exhausting myself or, god forbid, believing their alleged expert analysis of what I must change in order to be loved.

It goes without saying, that mxn in general are universally trash, but if you find yourself crying under fairy lights wondering why Jonathan is ghosting you after saying you were the most beautiful person he has ever met, please know it is not your fault art spaces are failing irrefutably at producing mxn capable of maintaining non sexual relationships, especially when we frequent spaces that applaud performative emotional articulation while doing almost nothing to ensure that vulnerability and respect exists off stage.

How best can we hold ourselves and others accountable to a base level of human decency in the venn diagram intersection of art and intimacy? How can we begin to demand being seen as more than just the consumable ways we present? What does it mean to be vulnerable in real and consensual ways?

Let me know when you find out.