I Saw the Matrix. It Was Empty. PEOPLE USED TO LOOK OUT ON THE PLAYGROUND AND SAY THAT THE BOYS WERE PLAYING SOCCER AND THE GIRLS WERE DOING NOTHING. BUT THE GIRLS WEREN’T DOING NOTHING—THEY WERE TALKING. THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT THE WORLD TO ONE ANOTHER. AND THEY BECAME VERY EXPERT ABOUT THAT IN A WAY THE BOYS DID NOT.
CAROL GILLIGAN, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
I read that quote once and thought I understood it. I thought it was a clue—a key to a lock. I see now I missed the point entirely. I was one of the boys on the playground, so obsessed with the rules of the game that I never learned the language of the world.
My world became a series of snapshots, a blur of faces and fleeting encounters that I collected like baseball cards. There was Petra, whose language I never spoke, communicating only through gestures and magic tricks on a deserted Croatian beach. We made love while she and her cousin chattered in Czech, their words a world I was locked out of. Was it connection, or just proximity?
There was Anya, slipping away from her family to sneak onto a stranger’s sailboat. There was confidence and sensuality, yes, but it was all part of a script. A transaction so clean I even left twenty euros for the wine.
There was a woman whose name I can’t remember. She was drunk, surrounded by her friends. I led her to a bathroom, and we never spoke again. It was, the logbook in my mind notes, overrated. A checkmark next to a blank space.
The list goes on, a ghostly Rolodex of women reduced to a single, defining trait. The anorexic virgin whose body was a landscape of pain I didn’t want to navigate. The older woman who wanted a “boy toy” as a birthday present, role-playing a fantasy that felt more like a performance than passion. The goth belly dancer I summoned with a cab fare. The sisters who no longer speak to each other.
My wish had come true. The challenge was gone. Women had become a puzzle I could solve, a program I could run. After months of accumulating knowledge and experience, I had finally gotten out of my own head.
Or so I thought.
What really happened was that I had built a new head to live in—a cold, analytical chamber. I learned the signals. I memorized the scripts. I knew when to push and when to pull, when to tease and when to feign sincerity. When a woman threw a test my way, I didn’t feel it; I processed it. I saw her attempt to gain validation or control not as a human moment of insecurity, but as a move in a game that I had to counter.
“I’ll tell you what,” I’d write back, my fingers moving with automated precision. “I’ll pay you back for the cab, like I promised, and then you can take me out to dinner in exchange for all those orgasms.”
It always worked.
I saw the matrix. The code that ran underneath every interaction. Inputs and outputs. Cause and effect. I could predict and manipulate the system. I had achieved mastery. I had become Mystery, the master of the game.
But Gilligan’s quote haunts me. The girls weren’t doing nothing. They were talking. They were building worlds with their words, forging connections I could only simulate. While I was on the playground mastering the game, they were becoming experts in what it meant to be human.
And I stood on the sidelines, a king with a hollow crown, wondering why, in a world full of people, I had never felt so profoundly alone.
