In the space provided for a short answer, one of my intro to lit. students writes a poem in which he compares me to a peacock, no, a pheasant…oh, even better: a quail. Yes, there’s something very quail-like—quailish?—about me, he decides. He decides to tell me. He decides I need to know. I dig my fingernails into my arm when I read it. I feel lightheaded. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. I call a friend and ask if I’m overreacting, if I’m the problem. No, that’s weird, trust me. No, it’s not okay. When I speak to the student after the following class, I have trouble telling him how, in what way, his poem’s inappropriate. I have trouble saying, you have made me animal, you have made me thing through your metaphor, a comparison between two objects without using ‘like’ or ‘as,’ a question on the test. He asks if I’ve filed a complaint, if he’s in trouble. No, I haven’t filed a complaint. I haven’t decided if he’s in trouble. I throw around a lot of conditionals: if you do this again, if you meant to insult me. He smiles, which unnerves me. “I was testing you,” he says. “I wanted to see if you were cool, or if you would freak out.”

I work nights at a cafe. I’m in college, and I get to know the regulars. We have time to talk on these shifts, unlike the morning rush. One of our regulars always orders an iced tea and then reads Marvels for a few hours, sometimes inside at a table or, when the weather’s nice, out on the patio. He’s thirty, a janitor at his dad’s machine shop. Sometimes I talk to him on my breaks because I’m bored. I’m nice to him because he’s a customer, because he’s someone to talk to. Maybe I flirt with him, or maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m just not sure what I’m doing, but it’s soon clear he’s waiting for my breaks, becomes desperate when I decide to eat in the back room my veggie fried rice from the Chinese buffet or chips ‘n’ queso from the Qdoba. There’s several times when I feel like he’s about to ask me out, that he’s trying to find a way to ease in, like a scalding bath. I never let him. I’m engaged to someone else. I start talking about my fiancee, about anything else. He stops coming so regularly, and then hardly at all, and then I don’t see him for a few weeks. Finally, one night, he approaches me at the register, rattling a metal Altoids tin. Open it. Inside are four kidney stones, though I don’t know what they are until he tells me. It’s his proof, his evidence. Too much black tea, the doctors say. He did this for me. Will I go out with him?

A guy I never talked to in high school messages me on Facebook. He’s heard I’m a writer. He’s writing a novel, here we go. He wants to know about book deals, about agents. Hold your little fillies—I’m a poet. I tell him I can’t help him, which he seems to accept. I tell him it’s been nice hearing from him. (I’m a liar.) He asks me if I ever wish I didn’t think so deeply about the world, didn’t feel so much, like all writers do. He wants to know if I sometimes wish I was ignorant, if I believe in bliss, like ghosts. He talks—types, rather—while I check my e-mail, like a friend’s photo. I think it ends with him saying, gotta go. He seems to feel inoculated against his boredom, immune to the mundane. I never speak to him again.

Another students borrows one of my books, tears some pages out, smokes with it, walks to return it to me in the rain so that it’s soaked by the time he hands it to me. He argues with all of my other students, but doesn’t deign to provide them with any feedback on their poems. He hates every text we read and quotes Ferlinghetti. He gets high/drunk/fucked up for his final self-reflection paper, types it without punctuation. In it, he says he hates people who call themselves poets, for people who call themselves poets are not the true poets of the world (a paraphrase) and then goes on to tell me I taught him nothing but does a flying backflip leap and sticks the “but i guess you did a good job kid” line at the end. I’m so angry I want to make flowers sprout from nostrils like nose hairs.

I’ve grown so weary of young men—and, don’t misunderstand me, it’s almost always young white men—who use me as a wall in their postured squash games of persona. As if they have to validate their uniqueness like a parking ticket. As if they want me to weigh their egos like a mongo-pumpkin at a county fair. As much as an old flame still burns for Frank Zappa, one of my early musical loves, when I listen again to Freak Out! by the Mothers, with its jangle-rock deadpan montage of doo-wop acid pop, I am reminded of all those young men, their shuffling little bird feet, their you-just-don’t-understand. I think about how some people, these men, take their silliness too seriously, how they wear Absurd AF™ like a brand.

As listeners, even fans, we must realize how privilege allowed Frank Zappa to be Frank Zappa; to sing about the yellow snow and poop-chutes and Catholic girls and dental floss; to testify against parental advisory labels at the Parents Music Resource Center Senate hearings; to organize a rotating cast of band members, including some of the best up-and-coming black jazz musicians like Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke, and Chester Thompson; to embody both his anti-war-on-drugs and anti-drugs stance; and to funnel all of his creative energy into some troubling, late-life, right-leaning politics. Zappa leveraged his weird-hairy-white-guy-with-a-big-nose image in order to challenge the status quo—or did he empower a new one?

I’m not suggesting that any of these young men looked up to any of the Mothers of Invention, and, for that matter, none of them likely knew who they were, but I am negotiating a threshold a privilege allowed young, white men, our culture’s message that that their cultivated “weirdness” excuses their abusive behaviors, including hardcore or micro-misogynies. For years, I have attempted to reconcile my love of Zappa’s music with many of his lyrics’ misogyny, homophobia, and racism, all of which is excused as humor, as “just that crazy guy.” For white men especially, we are so used to excusing these abuses as side effects of genius, of eccentricities, but I don’t want that any more. Being deep is often so shallow. I want to call out our darling boys. I want to say you’re so unique you’re nothing special.

—Emilia Phillips