my first friend was a girl. this alone should have been enough to stop me from spiralling down into the cesspit of violent misogyny and yet there i was, erasing the simple existence of millions of girls and women (not to mention all the non-binary folk out there) with every stroke of my pilot g2 07 black; this vortex was so immense and so unforgiving that the vast majority of my written works did not even feature a single female character. forget about passing the bechdel test; this was a different kind of exam, one that i failed miserably, one designed to test the ability of the writer to treat every human being as the precious, unique individual they are, rather than reducing them to one or two generic adjectives of a personality, maybe a hair colour, and maybe even a position or two taken on those great fields of war that we call ‘sporting matches’. yet i could not get it through my sixth-grade, precursorially-smashed skull to do such an outrageous thing. ah, yes, but boys will be boys will be boys will be boys until we all stand hand in hand and say ‘fuck that noise’.