Out of Tune, Sir

So I’ve been reading.  A lot.  Since I’m not in classes, I’ve been using my usual “for-class reading” time to instead get a jump on that looming exam.  This entry, however, is not about reading.  It’s not about literature.  Heck, it’s not even about theatre.

I don’t tend to think of myself as a feminist and at times I even consider myself an anti-feminist.  However, in the past year or so, I’ve realized that I actually have fairly strong convictions about gender relations.  I don’t like to categorize these convictions which is why I’ve spent so long avoiding the “feminist” label, and I don’t generally like to talk about them either because I do have such a hard time categorizing them.

However.  Something happened to me last night that has set me on a downward spiral of righteous estrogen rage and I feel like I need to share it.

A couple buddies and I are what you may call karaoke connoisseurs.  Several times a week, we head out to follow a local karaoke DJ (who we’ve since made friends with) about her rounds.  Throughout this process, we’ve met her other regulars as well as bartenders, managers, waiters, and just random people.  We tend to bring the thunder with our karaoke; all of us are theatre people of one variety of another so karaoke is a really our excuse to perform.  We rehearse.  We plan.  We dance.  It turns into a quasi-impromptu show on a semi-regular basis and tends to draw a large crowd of onlookers anywhere we go.  This, in turn, means that the venues love us.  We increase their customer base and we keep things fun for everyone (oh and we’re polite and good tippers). 

Last night we were out in a classier area of New Jersey at what we jokingly refer to as “the local dive bar”.  It’s actually a fairly upscale pub/restaurant with an art gallery in the back.  I don’t know why they decided to incorporate karaoke into all of this, I guess they figured that on Wednesdays their clientele wasn’t exactly going to suffer…. Even from some of the horror-stories-with-a-mic that we’ve seen.

So we were sitting at the bar, drinking, singing, and having an over-all good night out, when an (obviously) very drunk guy sidles up next to me.  He had all the capacity for subtlety of a brick wall.  When I noticed that he was edging closer, I edged away.  This continued comically until I realized I had nowhere else to edge, and turned my back to him.  Apparently this wasn’t enough of a signal as he tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could buy me a drink.  Now let me get one thing straight.  I’m not opposed to someone buying me a drink the same way I’m not opposed to someone opening doors for me or holding my chair out so that I can be seated.  I like old-fashioned things and I like gentlemen.  However, if someone respectfully offers to buy me a drink, and I respectfully decline, in my opinion that should be the end of things.  I’m not Caesar with the crown, I have nothing to prove by saying “no” multiple times before giving in, a word to the wise: in cases like these “no” really means “no”.

Here is where the rage began.  After saying “no” very kindly and thanking him for the offer before trying to turn back to my friends, he caught me by the arm and said “why not?”  Okay, he was drunk, apparently kindness wasn’t what he was looking for.  At this point I felt utterly justified in using a bit more force to make my point.  I said, as bluntly as I could without being mean, “Because I don’t want you to buy me a drink.” before turning to my crowd.

At this point, one of the guys in my crew came over to valiantly rescue me from the situation.  He put his arm around me and starting emitting “she’s mine” signals like they were going out of style.  This particular friend is a long-time buddy of mine so the signals happened to be mostly fabricated (his girl friend was also sitting right there at the time and fully endorsed his assistance in my plight).  After about ten minutes of this, aforementioned creep grabbed his coat and made a pit-stop at the men’s room (where, incidentally, due to the acoustics of the restaurant you can hear everything anyone says at my end of the bar as though those people were standing right next to you so I’m certain he heard the resulting conversation that I had with the bartender, my friends and the other regulars who, also due to funny acoustics, had had a front-row seat for the entire exchange even over the Japanese guy fulfilling racial stereotypes loudly next to us and were thoroughly amused by the entire situation) before leaving the bar.

So here’s what bugs me.  Why is it that my word isn’t good enough for Mister Crown Royal?  Why is it that I have to justify my kindly-stated denial of his offer in such a way as to please him before he will leave me alone?  Why isn’t my honest opinion enough to get the jerk away from me, but instead I need a man to step in to validate my refusal?  The age of the little house-wife is long past, women have the vote and can perform any job a man can perform, why is my clear language not strong enough for mister testosterone? 

I think what bothers me about it is the unstated implication that A) I, as a woman, don’t know what’s good for me and thereby my word can’t be trusted and B) my worth in the situation is less than that of a man because it takes a man’s presence to shake the other man.  We don’t live in the jungle.  I’m not anyone’s territory.  I shouldn’t have to be treated like a member of some dominant male’s pack to keep another rogue from stalking around and trying to perform drunken mating dances in my face.  Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to my friend for interceding on my behalf (and would ask any male friend to do the same in that situation), but the fact that he (or anyone else) has to really grinds my gears.  I, as a single woman, should not have to worry about going out and getting a drink with friends without being harassed by men who won’t leave me alone simply because there is not another man there to claim me.

What is it about our society that encourages this pushy kind of behavior?  If I had been a man and he a woman, would it have taken another woman to bail me out or would he just have accepted that I was being straightforward, honest, and really did not want his company?  Do we teach the men of our world to act this way because women lie, or because they don’t really know what they want?  How chauvinistic have we, as a society become?  And what are we teaching our children about gender roles when they can watch this sort of thing play out on TV in any given sit-com?  Are confident, strong women doomed to be the butt of the joke because clearly they can’t say no and clearly they just aren’t aware of their own feelings enough to understand why they can’t say no?  And what makes a guy cocky enough to think he’s something special anyway?  It’s the same machismo mentality that makes men think gay guys are going to root them out of any room somehow and hit on them to make them uncomfortable…. No, you are not God’s gift to man (or woman).  Get over yourself.

In any event, I’m seriously considering writing a pamphlet about this to hand to the next drunken loser who attempts to shove his unwanted advances in my empty beverage glass.  Take this, read it, understand it, and then maybe we’ll have something to talk about. 

…But only if you’re cute.

Talk Nerdy To Me

Feminism is a topic that comes up a lot at Rutgers.  Our department was a pioneer in feminist criticism, many of the professors are feminist critics, and we house a thriving concentration in women/gender studies which ensures that many of the students are feminist critics as well. 

For me, feminism and feminist criticism is hard to talk about.  Mostly because I’m still unsure where I stand on the matter.  I used to think of myself as above the argument; so they’re women, who write stuff, why is everyone making such a big deal of it?  Then I realized that I was a part of the argument, I just struggled fruitlessly against it.  There are innate topics of discussion regarding women and literature, women in literature, and women talking about literature I just didn’t want to talk about them.  I slowly came to wonder why that was.  Though I’ve made some progress in answering this question for myself, it’s not enough that I can truly articulate fully my ideas on it.  Suffice to say that I tend to play every side of the field when women come up in classroom conversation.  This is mostly because I hate when a roomful of smart people agree on something… though I will admit that I like to see them twitch when I suggest that a biological imperative began the tradition of woman as home-maker and perhaps that tradition warrants some respect as a valid way to live one’s life.

In any case, we were discussing Wollstonecraft in Romantics last night and one of the girls made a comment to the following effect, “In Wollstonecraft’s time, men had to tell women they were beautiful because it was the only socially acceptable way to validate them”.

Well isn’t that just a mouthful?

I could hear my personal demons whispering behind my shoulders.  They had somehow picked the lock on their well-chained closet and, given strength by the aforementioned suggestion, had returned to haunt me.

I flashed back to a conversation I had had with an ex of mine.  He took great pride in the fact that all of his friends, upon meeting me, would clap him on the back and say “good job”.  Having recalled said meetings I realized that “meet” was a relative term.  We were ships in the night with nothing more than a handshake and a hello.  These people didn’t know me.  They had only seen me.  Their complements weren’t because of my ability to recite sonnets at whim, my wit as a conversationalist, my fabulous writing talents or my impeccable modesty, they were simply based upon a superficial visual appraisal.  His friends thought I was pretty and, thereby, a catch.  And that made him happy.

Whoa.  WHOA.  As much as I like to dress up, play with makeup, wear heels and look nice, as much as I like to play arm candy for any given evening at the theatre, as much as I joke that I’d happily be a trophy wife for the right millionaire, something about the situation did not sit well with me.  I couldn’t blame his friends, they were boys and well, boys will be boys.  But I did expect something more from him.  Some modicum of respect for not just how my hair looked, but what it hid.  Some nod towards how capable I am.  Some witty addition from him to the effect of “yea, and she can parse a sentence too!”

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that he didn’t acknowledge and respect my capabilities, it was just that he didn’t think it was important to complement them.  He would send me papers to edit, he would ask my opinion on poetry, but he wouldn’t tell his friends that I graduated NYU with Latin Honors.

This, I have found, is not an uncommon occurrence.  Complements given to women still run in the vein of visual appreciation rather than intellectual satisfaction.  We are much more likely to hear (and, in turn, say) “I love your outfit!” than “I love your prose!”.  Somehow, society expects this of us.  Especially as a woman, there is pressure to wear pretty dresses and heels so that some man can tell me I look nice when I’d much rather hear about how insightful I am.

A very dear friend of mine is currently teaching Freshman Comp at Rutgers.  When one of her friends found out that she had received the position, said friend’s immediate reaction was “You’re going to be the hottest professor ever!”.  My friend the professor explained to me the sour taste this left in her mouth.  Rather than complementing her capabilities as a teacher, her writing, or her thoughtfulness, it was instead all about how she looked. 

I’m not saying there’s no place for such things.  Every woman wants to hear that she’s pretty once in a while.  But those are snacks, unsubstantial and unsustaining.  They are as superficially pleasing as they are insightful. 

Moreover, “beauty” is an aesthetic judgment and ultimately random.  I can’t control my genetics.  I didn’t choose the way I look.  Maybe I chose how I augment these looks with clothing, shoes, makeup, accessories – but that is nominal.  Clothes don’t make the girl.  My mind?  That is something I work at.  Every day, every hour, I work hard to be smart.  I’d much rather hear about how that work has paid off than how some proteins randomly aligned themselves before I even had consciousness to care about it.

In short: tell the academic, big-brained woman in your life that she’s pretty sometimes, but if you really want to tell her something that will make her happy, tell her she’s smart.  Dote on the size of her medulla, not the amount of time she put in at the salon.  Paddle in her prose, not her choice in dresses that evening.  Most importantly, don’t just tell her that she’s a genius, tell her why you think she’s a genius.  It shows her that you actually care enough to look deeper than her skin.