Dear Courtland Sykes: I blame the snakes.

Last year, Missouri Senate candidate Courtland Sykes was asked what he thought of women’s rights by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and his answers surfaced last week.

According to his 11-page response, he supports the right of his fiancée, Obsession by Calvin Klein*, to whip up “a home-cooked dinner at six every night,” but he’s opposed to “nail-biting, manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils” who have changed the definition of modern womanhood to “suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads.”

In response, I just want to say I get it, Courtland. Feminists are the worst. We’re so mad all the time, lashing out at men like Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, and Steve Wynn, who are just going about their business being super-sexy and, apparently, irresistible to women. What could we possibly be so mad about?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s ALL THE FUCKING SNAKES IN OUR HEADS.

I’m sorry for the swear, but here’s the thing, Courtland. If you’d ever had even one snake in your head, you’d know. It’s unpleasant. You can feel them up there, slithering around.

But, as you mentioned, feminists are dealing with what can only be described as a crap-ton of snakes up there, and the worst part is, they have opinions.

Like on Monday when Grammy president Neil Portnow defended the fact that just one woman had won a main award by saying that women needed to “step up,” I was totally okay with it. That sounds reasonable... women should step up, right? Maybe they’re just not trying as hard Bruno Mars, because he looks like he’s trying very, very hard and I’m impressed as hell with his get-up-and-go. But there’s a garter snake named Clarence all up in my prefrontal cortex who was like, “NOT COOL, NEIL!” and now I’m upset.

And when up to 2.5 million women (and thousands of men) marched on January 20 and it registered as a mere blip on the Sunday news shows, I thought, “Well, they do have the government shutdown to talk about.” But there’s this baby asp in the back of my mind (literally) that is having none of it.

“This is bullshit and you know it,” he says between extremely painful bites. And now I’m pissed. And probably dying, which I’m even more pissed about.

Of course I want to be more like Shalimar** and cook my man dinner every night with my nail-bitten hands and not have an ounce of awareness of institutionalized sexism or the fact that abortion rights are being chipped away by state legislatures and a Republican-controlled Congress. But it’s impossible to ignore a giant knot of pulsing snakes in my brain who have a subscription to Bitch magazine and are somehow pirating a C-SPAN feed.

So I apologize, Courtland, for all the feminists out there harshing your 19th century mellow. We’ll be happy to fall in line and support you and every man like you, if you can just do something about all these motherfucking snakes in our motherfucking brains.

*I think her name is actually Chanel. Apologies for the error.

**It’s definitely Chanel, I think. Apologies again.