Men don't do things they don't want to do

In which I tally all the time I waste being a woman.

I was in a Zoom meeting, debating with a group of writers about whether we should follow the writing that feels easiest or force ourselves to muscle through what feels hard, when one of the men in the group came off mute to utter a phrase that would haunt me for days.

“I try not to do anything I don’t want to do,” he said.

Because I am chronically uncertain, I am always shopping for new ways of Being, and this intrigued me. He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do! I thought to myself. That’s it!

But of course, many problems with this approach came to mind.

What do you do about work? I asked him in a Zoom DM when the group broke to do a generative exercise. He never responded. I guess he didn’t want to! This tapped a deep well of memories of other men who have never responded to me, and I began to feel less charitable to the man and his breezy outlook.

It only took me until the end of the Zoom meeting to conclude that this attitude is extremely male, and that hunch is in fact backed up by research. Even among singletons, the Gender Equity Policy Institute found in 2024, women enjoy 17% less free time than their male counterparts. Says the report: “Being a single woman is associated with having around 2.6 hours less free time per week compared to a male peer.”

A very good noticing indeed.

I wondered: how many hours per week do I spend doing shit I don’t want to do? Surely more than 2.6 hours. What follows are my field notes from this pressingly urgent investigation.

***For legal reasons, let’s call this one autofiction.***

Day One

I wake up at 5:11a to the metallic melody of my cats’ dry food dispensing from the spout of their automatic feeder. Two weeks ago, I took one cat to the vet to have her anal glands expressed. She came home smelling like ass (or, as my friend Max pointed out, lack thereof), and my other cat no longer recognizes her scent. Post-vet visit, whenever they encounter each other in the hallway, they moan and shriek and fill the apartment with the kind of tension I’ve only ever experienced when I want to fuck someone I really shouldn’t. So for two weeks, I’ve meticulously kept them apart and slowly reintroduced them to each other as delicately as one would perform peace work in a region recently ravaged by ethnic violence. I have even engaged a local cat whisperer, who taught me words like nonrecognition aggression and high-value resources. His services cost $125 for half an hour of Zoom advice.

A man making very good money off of my feminine propensity to do things I don’t want to do.

As part of this, at 5:11a, I accompany my cats to the autofeeder to oversee the successful sharing of these high-value brown rocks and then shepherd them back to their safe zones. After this, I cannot go back to sleep.

Would a man put up with this indignity? I lie there and think to myself. I remember that my guy friend gave away his cat because it was too annoying to vacuum his apartment all the time. And recently, on a date with a man, I explained that my cats are extremely high maintenance, but what am I supposed to do, get rid of them? The guy shrugged as if to say, well, yeah, that’s what I would do.

I do not agree. According to my personal values, you should hang onto a pet you’ve adopted unless said pet is really, really impacting your life—like you can’t fall asleep at all and you’re on probation at work, or you’re being sued for all you’re worth after putting a friend in the hospital with cat scratch fever. Plus, my cats are really cute, and I love them! What a silly, feminine impulse, to love an animal and delight in a years-long cross-species bond.

Total time lost doing something I didn’t want to do: My alarm was set for 6:30a, so, 1h 19m.

Day Two

I’m in the middle of my freelance graphic design work when I get a text from a male client.

Sarah deck will be coming shortly to polish and make deck high end this is move quickly its making it clear and needs design

This communication style is, unfortunately, typical of this client. (And most men at work: another client texted me the other day, out of the blue, nothing but a cryptic “Soonest.”) The female project manager who usually protects me from having to deal with the first client is on vacation. I have told him repeatedly that I will not begin work on any projects until he sends me a clear and coherent brief with a deadline, and I remind him of this again.

Here is WIP find a richness in simple use of color, richer photography once we shoot and finding forms and layers where the gradient is subtlety included verses large uses of it, see here in this brand light used with refine type. We need to find layer’s and shape like social posts maybe the forms have rounded edges to marry to the logo. Illustration finding the form in shape and simplicity and graphic. Type needs to be more refined, use space and hero beautiful photography

This is as close as this client tends to get to a brief, so I move some things around to accommodate his request. Do I want to do this? Absolutely not! I want to do it even less than I want to do my other work, which is at least for clients who respect me. But, this client happens to pay me the most, and I like being able to order DoorDash and live in a liberal city, so I do it.

Two hours later, I get another email from my client.

Seems first draft there ok with content for now so no immediate need for tomorrow

I am incredulous. Does this mean what I think it means? I ask for clarity again.

Can stop working on this for now
Sent from my iPhone

Time lost doing something I didn’t apparently even need to do, let alone want to do: 2 hours.

Day Three

My landlord calls. He always calls me when he needs to communicate with the tenants in our building, because I have lived here the longest and am the friendliest and am therefore the unofficial mayor of the building. I am always the person he asks to talk to prospective new tenants and strike the right balance of honest and encouraging, telling them that yes, my friend once got held at knifepoint in broad daylight nearby, but other than that there are lots of different kinds of noodle joints from all around the world in this neighborhood! Plus, there’s parking and in-unit laundry.

My landlord tells me he had to get rid of a toilet in his personal home and is breaking it into tiny pieces and depositing it in our trash bin as we speak. There is, indeed, an extremely percussive banging sound echoing off the concrete.

“Do you normally fill the trash each week?” he asks. There are 8 people living in this building and although it is the law in San Francisco, none of us compost with any real regularity. The guy who just moved in doesn’t even know that you can’t recycle styrofoam, so I often move it into the trash bin, I guess because I’m a woman?

“Yes,” I say. “We are using the entire trash bin for our trash.”

“Aw, shoot,” he says, and agrees to only place half the toilet in our trash bin.

That’s probably illegal, my friend Tommy texts me. I research this and find that he is right. I feel sad, because I actually really like my landlord, and think of him as a sort of father figure I can call when I don’t know how to patch the wall or snake the drain. I don’t think he consents to that type of relationship, and once bought me my own snake and told me to stop calling him.

Time spent learning my chosen father figure is, in fact, flawed: 32 minutes.

Day Four

I recently realized I want a partner, so I go on Tinder to do some swiping, even though I don’t want to!!!

Generally on the apps, I’ve noticed men asking more questions. This is a net good. Someone in the manosphere must have recently preached to them about talking about something other than oneself. The problem is, they don’t know how to ask good questions. Probably because most of them have never done it. So now instead of just, you know, asking simple follow-up questions or inquiring more about how something felt, they start with the question, and the question is so cringe I can’t imagine ever answering it. Here is a recent sampling.

While compiling these, I did realize I am probably being too hard on these people and I’m just sick of online dating, so answering any message seems unappealing. But still, put together, they are a sight to behold. Also, I wanted to brag about being told I look like AOC.

My profile says that I like reading, writing, and seeing movies. This is an attempt to attract someone who also doesn’t want to go hiking—a near impossibility in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What’s a good movie you’ve seen recently? one “Jeremy” busts into my DMs demanding to know. No hello, no how are you. I realize that this is kind of on me, for putting that in my profile, but I have been at home with these fucking cats for two weeks and was sick over the holidays, so I haven’t seen anything in a theater in a while. Plus, I was imagining this tidbit leading to, you know, a date, not a pop quiz.

I have seen no good movies lately!! I write to “Jeremy.” It’s really upsetting. I want to see Wuthering Heights and the Charli XCX movie. But I’m also not sure those are any good. What about you! Inspire me

He writes back:

Not a recent one but I watched Fire Walk With Me with a friend recently which was good.

Then, refusing to take the hint and pivot the conversation to something I actually want to discuss:

What’s the last *really good* movie you saw?

I give up.

Time spent swiping: 1h 4m.

Day Five

I am sitting in bed engaging in my morning ritual, which consists of alternating between journaling and scrolling—an activity that would probably make Julia Cameron keel over and die. This takes, on a good day, a full hour. Part of the reason for my high level of distractibility is that I am constantly being bombarded with potential improvements I could be making to my physical appearance. Recently, a viral clip from Love Is Blind of a leprechaun dumping an infectious disease doctor who looks like Rachel Bilson but doesn’t do Pilates daily graced my screen. While the reason it went viral is that the entire world hates him, I have still internalized his message and realize I am holding the secret belief that if I were thinner things would be going better for me romantically.

This morning I am confronted with an ad for a GLP-1 in pill form. I Google this and get served an ad for the weight-loss app Noom. I remember that everyone always says, “people really like Noom!” The fact that no one I know has ever successfully used Noom to lose weight doesn’t seem to factor into what happens next, which is that I complete several quizzes about my level of activity, my attitude toward losing weight, and if there are any milestones on the horizon that I might want to be thinner for. Although I am not being charged today, I hand over my credit card number.

The 17th step is to actually download the app. Once I do, I remember that I’ve done this before, and that the app’s copywriting makes me want to die. What is one kind thing your heart needs to hear right now? a section of the app titled “Take Your Weekly Art Break” asks me. The next screen is a digital image of an impressionist painting. I navigate to the settings section of the Noom app, cancel my subscription, and delete the app.

Time spent being on a diet: 47 minutes.

Overall, it seems that I spend well above the average amount of time doing things I don’t want to do. If you add up all the entries here, the total is much higher than 2.6 hours, and I don’t even think that encompasses all of the things that I didn’t want to do. The scope is, if you can imagine, even broader than what I’ve laid out here.

After careful consideration, though, I have determined that I like it this way. I laughed at my own jokes a lot while writing this piece. And I wouldn’t have done so if I only did things I wanted to do. Life is conflict! Life is hardship! It is 2026 and we are frictionmaxxing. This is womanhood. This is the human condition.