Published in Superpresent Magazine, Fall 2023
https://superpresent.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/V3N4-PDF-version.pdf
“Did you get my gift?” Peter’s text message flashed on my screen as zombies attacked survivors in a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. metro tunnel. My seventeen-year-old daughter Úna and I were watching the last season of The Walking Dead on my laptop, which was connected to my phone.
Peter had enabled signature tracking, so he knew damned well I’d received the gift. It was a book I told him I did not want, accompanied by a cringey, sentimental note on thick, creamy paper—the expensive kind with frayed edges.
After 30 minutes, another text. “Hey. Everything okay?”
We didn’t have plans. I hadn’t told him I would call him. I hadn’t responded to his messages from the night before. I don’t have any major medical or mental health issues that would prompt a sensible person to be concerned about me.
Twenty minutes later, a third text: “Can I call you?”
“Mom,” Úna said. “You have to be more direct. He’s not getting the message.”
In my experience, being direct with men when you disagree with them, especially the domineering ones, carries potentially violent consequences. As Courtney Barnett sings, “Men are worried that women will laugh at them / women are worried that men will kill them.”
Peter had been unmarried for about a year when one of our mutual friends told him I was also recently single. When he asked me out, he said it was just for companionship. It took me a while to realize that it was a date.
“I’m not looking for a relationship. At all,” I said, once I realized we weren’t having dinner as acquaintances but as potential lovers.
“Oh, believe me, I’m not either.” When someone says, “believe me,” what follows next is usually a lie.
Case in point: He began messaging me several times a day—long texts with misspellings and grammatical errors. He asked to see me during impossible times that were far too frequent: midweek, Sunday.
“I’ll come out to Bayside. Just for an hour.”
“I can’t. I’m prepping meals and getting ready for the week.”
“Well, if something changes, call me.”
“It won’t.”
“Well, just in case. I’m around.”
A few days later: “Are you going to Rachel and Vinny’s party?”
“Oh God no, it’s a Tuesday. I don’t get home from work until 7, then I’m up again at 5 the next morning.”
Then, from the party: “I wish you were here. You would really elevate this gathering. Sure you can’t come?”
I thought he was a decent enough guy. I didn’t want to hurt him or alienate our mutual friends. But at this point in my life, I could never fall for someone with such terrible listening skills and glaring control issues. Meanwhile, he told Rachel he was smitten with me. He confided in Vinny that he could see himself falling in love with me.
When I first started writing this, my idea was that Peter, who had married his high school sweetheart and thus not dated since the 1990s, was trapped in an outdated dating schema. Going out with him was like stepping into a time capsule.
In the 1990s, as a woman, if a man decided that he wanted you and you didn’t feel the same, it was up to you to fend him off. His feelings took precedence over yours: his decision to pursue you became your problem. You were responsible for his bruised ego. His delicate, tender feelings were entirely in your hands. And if you initially said yes—or maybe—and then changed your mind? What a tease. How cruel. You fickle heartbreaker you.
I planned to write about how glad I was that such double standards had been swept away by changes wrought by various waves of feminism, increased LGBTQ+ and trans visibility, and the #MeToo movement. But then Úna had an eerily similar experience. A boy she had been talking to—I think his name was Wyatt—began messaging her several times a day, bombarding her with invitations and requests to hang out. When she told him to give her some space, he sent her paragraph-length texts demanding an explanation and DMed her friends asking what her problem was. Then, when she told him she didn’t want to see him at all anymore, he argued with her, as if he could convince her to like him by undermining her expressed wishes.
When I was around Úna’s age, I dated a 22-year-old who was in a local band signed to an indie label. He could buy beer and get my friends and me into 21+ shows. He was on tour for weeks at a time, and I was pretty sure he was seeing other girls. But when someone told him that I’d hooked up with someone—a boy my own age—at a party one night, he unleashed his fury in a late-night phone call, hurling every insult an adult man could summon at a teenage girl. For years afterwards he referred to me as “Cunt Kinney.”
Úna was exasperated by Wyatt’s insistence, but I found his refusal to accept her rejection worrisome.
“You never know when someone is going to snap, Úna,” I warned her one night over zombies and salty snacks. “Stay out of his orbit, if you can.”
“Please Mom, this kid is an idiot. It’s fine.”
“Well, Daryl Dixon wouldn’t text a woman a million times if she didn’t respond.”
“Oh my God, you and Daryl! All the moms love him.”
In The Walking Dead, Daryl is tough and fearless. He’s a superb hunter and tracker with a perfect sense of timing. But he is also vulnerable, loyal, and sensitive; he uses his emotional experiences to rise above his prejudices. He’s a neo-classical hero updated for the 21st century. He resembles Achilles in his near-immortality, Agamemnon in his bravery, and Odysseus in his cleverness. He embodies the Romanticism of Rousseau: he is raw and alive, in synch with the wilderness and its natural order. In contrast, the supernatural undead pervert the life cycle. He’s cool under pressure like James Bond, but without 007’s penchant for objectifying women.
There is also something deeply satisfying about a redeemed rake, a born-again bad boy. Daryl embodies the most noble elements of traditional masculinity (except that one time he murdered his ex-girlfriend) with most of the toxicity leached out. His best friend is a woman in her 50s. He questions his decisions. He admits his mistakes. He is introspective. He acts as a father to orphaned and abandoned children. He recognizes that the rules in the old world only helped those who had power.
Moreover, Daryl’s character demonstrates the ability we all possess to improve. Initially, he was a sidekick to his white supremacist, misogynistic brother, Merle. Together, they planned to pillage from vulnerable people in the post-apocalyptic Georgia woods. However, ultimately, Daryl evolves into a valued member of the core group of survivors. He observes the world around him and makes decisions based on fellowship and humanity. Meanwhile, Merle remains a selfish prick, albeit not without his moments of glory, and dies in Season Three.
I often come across articles that bemoan women’s “confidence gap.” But questioning oneself is a sign of intelligence and thoughtfulness. Perhaps women have been better trained than men to realize the limits and fallacy of empirical evidence. Different people interpret the same event in various ways given their past experiences and distinct identities. Recognizing the limits of our own observational abilities and admitting that others have equally compelling and valid responses indicates respect for the myriad variants of perception and the vastly different conclusions individuals draw about given stimuli. It challenges the (usually horrible) idea of “going with your gut.” Those who cite their own experience as valid evidence to prove their interpretation—without questioning the validity of that experience—stride confidently yet ignorantly through this world.
Women’s unassertiveness is also widely seen as a deficit, but neither is this learned trait necessarily a weakness. Rather, it is often a crucial survival skill. I know how to make myself small and disappear in a crowded place to avoid detection, rage, and enmity. The Walking Dead television series recognizes this ability as a strength. Carol, Daryl’s best friend, consistently uses others’ preconceptions about older women to deadly advantage. When Daryl is captured by a rival gang in Season Seven, he utilizes Carol’s tactics of patient subterfuge to engineer a successful escape.
While I still maintain that ghosting is a perfectly acceptable, even compassionate, response to an unwanted advance—after all, as Derrida taught us, meaning also derives from what is not said—I eventually took Úna’s advice and told Peter I wasn’t interested. A few weeks later, I ran into him at an outdoor concert with our mutual friends. At first, he stood behind me glowering. However, like Carol, I have a large toolbox of techniques to draw upon that deflect and deescalate. Being nauseatingly pleasant is one of those tools. I turned around and asked him where his son had decided to attend college. He looked surprised and disarmed.
“University of —–,” he said. “Not his first choice, but…”
“You must be very proud—it’s hard to get in there. Good for him.”
He nodded, then paused. “I’m dating someone, you know. She was going to come today but something came up.”
“Oh,” I said, “That’s great. Just don’t be so pushy with her. You know, chill out a bit.”
The pleasantness evaporated. He glared at me. “Well, to be fair,” he said, “You led me on.”
I left shortly after, angry yet amused. I hadn’t heard that phrase, at least applied to my actions, in decades. On the subway ride home, I messaged a friend, “Peter says I led him on. Cunt Kinney strikes again, 30 years later. Lol.”
One of my prized possessions is a soap-on-a-rope rendition of Daryl’s zombie ear necklace from Season Two that Úna bought me with her own money. The ear necklace episode was a turning point for Daryl: he had to decide whether to rejoin the fellowship of survivors or become mired in savagery by enacting vengeance in the wilderness.
This is the difficulty: the characters are constantly being betrayed, constantly finding shelter and community only to have it destroyed. But they must trust again to live—surviving in the wasteland requires other people. In a paradoxical turn, Daryl even finds his only romantic love interest in the show because of his Thoreauvian retreat into the forest.
While the human instinct to form bonds is often exploited by rivals, it is ultimately destructive to resist the fellowship of others, however singularly dangerous such unions have been in the past. Society, civilization, is founded on trust. Trust can only truly exist when we understand each other in our differences. To comprehend someone’s differences, we must divorce ourselves from what we think we know and really listen to others. We must relearn a skill most of us lost in childhood and observe through eyes untainted by prejudice and preconception: a challenging task, indeed.
Endings in writing are difficult because they are inherently false. Endings pretend that everything is all wrapped up and neat, which is rarely accurate. Most endings are more like transitions from one mess to another. Some humans live to fight another day; others turn into monsters; still others teeter somewhere on the brink between spitefulness and solidarity. Almost all of us stumble blindly into the wilderness, fleeing one danger only to find another hazard. We are helplessly married to flawed perceptions based on the faulty evidence of our past experiences. The only surety is that there will be a zombie influx to disrupt any refuge we might find. Their mindless persistence, their unthinking pursuit of flesh, their single-minded focus on what they desire mirrors the tenacity of the Wyatts and Peters of our worlds, to whom I offer this advice: Dude, be like Daryl. Evolve. Don’t die in Season Three.
