The shittiness of "shit tests"

Why men are giving up on women, part 8

In trying to think of a fit and proper way to conclude this series of articles— which have all run under the title or subtitle of “Why men are giving up on women”— my mind first hit upon the notion of collecting horror stories, both from experience, observation, and word of mouth, which demonstrate precisely the type of female behavior which has caused many modern men to give up on modern women.

The more I thought about this idea, however, the less appeal it held. Anyone can tell anecdotes, after all. Discussing anecdotes prompts the critique that one is simply being selective, and those who wish to challenge your perspective can no doubt mount a counter-offensive consisting of counter-anecdotes purporting to support a counter-argument. Thus, anecdotes alone aren’t a terribly effective instrument of persuasion.

In the end, I thought it best to focus upon a certain event that I recall, something that didn’t happen directly to me, but rather to a friend, for the reason that this particular incident has a vast and expansive experiential resonance. In hearing this story, many a man will recall a similar circumstance that he has faced, even if the particulars of his case are different.

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A friend of mine, then, once had a girlfriend. The two of them had been together for a few months, and in that time period they had engaged in sexual intercourse a goodly number of times. One fateful day, following an act of said intercourse, as my friend was basking in the post-coital afterglow, his girlfriend cuddled up to him and asked, in an innocent-sounding voice:

"What’s your favorite thing about making love?”

My friend ought to have heard the warning bells. He should have seen Robby the Robot in his mind’s eye flailing his arms wildly and declaring, “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” He should have been immediately on his guard, sizing up the face of his lover, the woman who had just asked this superficially guileless question, the same way a chess player sizes up his opponent after a surprising move, or like a slugger at the bat might size up a pitcher before he throws a 3-2 offering with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.

What my friend should have seen in his mind’s eye

But it seems that my friend, still under the chemical haze brought about by his recent orgasmic expenditure, failed to comprehend the cruciality of the moment. He answered honestly, something along the lines of, “Two sweaty bodies, passionately intertwined, bringing one another ecstasy.”

Needless to say, that was the wrong answer.

“Oh, really, that’s your favorite thing about making love?” the young woman asked sharply, jolting upright in bed and staring at my friend with severe reprobation.

“Uhhh, yeah,” my friend answered, suddenly aware that the girl who’d been snuggling so lovingly moments before had become unaccountably upset. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine!” she rejoined curtly, slipping on a robe, stomping into the bathroom, and slamming and locking the door.

My friend stumbled out of bed, dismayed at this inexplicable turn of events. He yelled through the door, asking her if she was okay, but heard nothing; a moment later, her loud sobs became audible. The door remained closed and locked, and my friend, quite stricken in spirit, sat on the edge of the bed, naked, feeling crestfallen, heartbroken… and utterly bewildered.

“I guess I said the wrong thing… but what was I supposed to say???”

About five minutes later, he asked again if she was okay, or if she needed anything, or if she wanted to talk. Again, there came no answer, just more sobs. Each fresh sob shook my friend’s heart, caused him to hate himself more, to deplore his own clearly horrific insensitivity, and to make sure he never again do what he just did (whatever it was).

At length, he heard her cry something in a pitiful, strangulated voice, but couldn’t make it out. He begged her to speak it again. “I said, ‘You didn’t say anything about me when I asked you what your favorite thing about making love was! I mean, do I mean nothing to you???”

Then the door swung open and she stormed back into the bedroom. She started to put her clothes back on, her face red, her brow furrowed. My friend tried to apologize, but she refused to hear him out. “I can’t be around you right now,” she muttered, before leaving the house. Perhaps for the last time? My friend, still naked, wasn’t sure. He collapsed onto the bed and buried his face in his hands.

“I felt so sleazy,” he later told me.

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Should my friend have known that his girlfriend was asking for affirmation when she asked this question? Was he a cad, a heel, a ruffian, a miscreant, for giving the answer that he did to the question he was asked? She could, after all, have made her intentions clear by phrasing the question more clearly: “What’s your favorite thing about making love to me?” Had she merely done that, he would have been more likely to give her the sort of answer that she wanted to hear. (Then again, who knows? Maybe she would have found fault with the answer even then…)

Unfortunately, my friend, being fairly young at the time, didn’t know about the phenomenon that has come to be called the “shit test.”

For those not in the know, when a woman “shit tests” a man, she behaves rudely or unreasonably to see if he’ll “call her on her shit.” If he stands up to her, then he passes the shit test, but if he knuckles under, he fails in her eyes, and she loses respect for him as a man.

Still, in this case, questions remained. Was the question itself a shit test? Or was her needless, histrionic overreaction to not hearing what she wanted to hear the true shit test? One suspects the latter, although I daresay it is not at all unusual for women in our time to become needlessly, histrionically overreactive over basically nothing, either.

To be fair, sometimes a semi-apology follows such acts, usually offering hormones as an excuse (“I’ve got PMS; I’ve got menstrual cramps; I’m pregnant,” etc.), but as often as not, no apology whatsoever is forthcoming.

Shit tests take many forms, but one would think that at some point the shit-tester would realize that it isn’t generous, kind, or compassionate to put her lover through such ordeals. In the case of my friend, who was rather young and quite romantically inexperienced at the time of the above-cited incident, he was completely mortified with himself for not saying the thing his girlfriend expected him to say at exactly the time she expected him to say it.

If it had been a shit test, then, he certainly didn’t pass it. (Whether this was related to why she eventually broke up with him is something we’ll perhaps never know, though I’d venture to say that he’s better off without her.)

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And there is the rub. All loving husbands/boyfriends are sincerely distressed to see their wives/girlfriends unhappy.

And knowing they they are the cause of said unhappiness is awful for them, even if, deep down, they know that their women are being utterly ridiculous. Loving, decent men— that is, men who do not belong to the subsection of the male sex who are narcissists, womanizers, psychopaths, and abusers (i.e., the ones who get most of the attention these days)— actually, ardently want the women in their lives to be happy. At the same time, they easily— perhaps a bit too easily— forgive women for putting them through a hell that they’ve done nothing to deserve, in these “shit test” scenarios.

Disturbingly, this sentiment doesn’t often appear to be reciprocated. That is to say, when these shit-testing women are putting their men through the ringer, making them feel awful about themselves, they don’t seem to hate the fact that their men are being made to feel desperately unhappy; on this matter, and elsewhere, there is a clear empathy imbalance.

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Given the prevalence of events such as the one I have described— shit-tests are far more frequent in the current toxified culture in which borderline-ization of women has almost become the norm— it should hardly be surprising that a growing number of men are opting out of relationships altogether.

It’s not that men have stopped loving women. It’s just that women have become increasingly exhausting to deal with, and the upside doesn’t seem to outweigh the downside.

Put another way— for now at least— it seems clear to many men that “the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.