If Your Pals Don’t Pass 'The Rock Test,' You Need To Ditch Them

Ever since the debut of my breakthrough and extremely scientific technique The Rock Test, men have flocked to me, begging for insight into how they can become Good. So today, I’m here to tell you how to move beyond not harassing women at work and level up to full Feminist by doing this one weird trick: Ditch your scumbag friend.

Everyone knows one: He’s the guy with all the “crazy” exes, his relationships are full of drama, he’s aggressively hitting on a different girl whenever you go out — but it’s time to stop acting like being a manipulative predator is an adorable personality quirk.

Here are all the guy friends you can go ahead and stop enabling any day now:

The guy who aggressively flirts with everyone all the time.

Flirting is fun, but so are water slides, and there’s a time and place for both. If your friend is so aggressively flirtatious he sees “no” as the start of a negotiation instead of the answer to his question, that is what’s called a red flag.

Take for example the notorious Harvey Weinstein. After that scandal broke, guys like George Clooney claimed to be caught off guard:

“A good bunch of people that I know would say, ‘Yeah, Harvey’s a dog’ or ‘Harvey’s chasing girls,’ but again, this is a very different kind of thing.”

Is it, George? Is it? Honestly, if someone tells you a man is “chasing girls,” your first question should always be, “Why are they running away?!”

The guy with the “crazy” exes.

For starters, whenever a guy tells you a woman is crazy, make him explain what crazy means. “Crazy” is too often used as a lazy, catch-all word for “behavior I don’t like.” So, did she leave a dead rabbit on his doorstep after their first date? Did she smear her own feces on her face and jump out at him from a hiding spot in the bushes she’d clearly been living in for days? Or did she send him eight strongly worded texts because he left her waiting at a bus station for four hours? There’s a big difference. Some people do have nightmare exes. But nobody has only nightmare exes. If that’s the case with your friend, I have bad news for you: He’s the nightmare!

He cheats. Like, he really cheats. Like wow.

Look, we’ve all made mistakes, done things we aren’t proud of, acted immaturely during the “does anyone even exist but me lol” phase of our 20s. But a man who is habitually bad to the women who love him is simply a habitually bad man. And hey, just as a general rule, if a dude can’t even keep a promise to a woman who is giving him sex, what makes you think he’ll keep a promise to you?

Guys who lie a lot are usually good at it. If you don’t believe me, watch a bunch of episodes of American Greed and take a shot every time a guy knew his accountant was cheating on his wife but never expected he’d cheat him! (No, actually don’t do that, you’ll be dead before midnight.)

Every woman you know hates him.

Women are socially conditioned to be friendly as hell even when we’re internally screaming. It’s why you so often see us smiling while wearing shoes built on top of spikes and apologizing to inanimate objects. So if you have a friend so awful the women in your life have actually said something, that’s bad. And sure, you could ignore the women, men have been ignoring the women since the dawn of time. But just know that if you choose to continue hanging out with your scumbag friend, you too will begin to be considered a scumbag by association. Good luck putting that on a resume.

So, there you have it, future feminist. Those are all the guys you can go ahead and not invite to your fantasy football league next year. Maybe this is all one guy, or maybe this disqualifies your whole league, but I will make the same promise to you that every romantic comedy has made to me: There are better men out there, you just have yet to comically run into them face-first at an airport.

Originally published on Medium.