Writing this morning in a cafe I glanced up and saw a young woman coming in on crutches, she was slightly built and small and following at a painful distance the bigger, older man who might have been her father or, perhaps, her lover. He forged ahead and sat down, he was already reading the menu while she struggled around the back of the couch and reached the table. He saw me watching and his attitude melted like magic. “Let me help you with those,” he demanded, holding out his hand for the crutches but without getting up.
What a guy.
Did I go over there and tell her she deserves more kindness, and he’s not treating her right? Yes I did. Ordinarily I would have said that to him directly. Today I was feeling somewhat fragile and tired so I waited until he went to the bathroom before I spoke.
When I told a friend about this man’s insensitivity she asked, what did you say? I told her, I asked if I could speak. She assumed I was offering help and said no no I’m fine. I said he should not be barrelling ahead and comfortably seated while she struggles on crutches. I said it hurt to see her gamely staggering round all the obstacles while he just left her and took his ease, he should be by her side and supporting and protecting her. I told her men have a protectiveness they can offer us in this world partly through size and I was sorry he was not doing that. She stared unblinking like she was getting chastised, perhaps just shock, and when I said you deserve more kindness and I don’t think this man is giving you that, she smiled a painful smile and said thank you.
Tag: women and men
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crutchpapa
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worldburn
Today in a cafe two small incidents seemed to me to illustrate the forms of self-involvement that are more common to women, and to men.
A man walked in and ordered a coffee at the counter. He wanted a latte, he wanted it skinny. It was takeaway and he went over to a table in the window and sat down. He was wearing shorts, dusty boots, and no shirt. His belly sagged between his knees. I thought, this is not one of those seaside towns where people wander in and out of the ocean all day and stand in bikinis eating chips. Wherever a woman would not wear swimming gear, a man needs to put on his shirt.
The waitress barged in, late from having missed her bus. She flung down her bag and began telling the staff about her room, which had ‘nearly burned down’ overnight. She described it as the latest in a chain of events which made her wonder had someone put the evil eye on her. What she described was entirely self-generated. She left ‘my candles going’ but ‘only for a minute’, while she was out of the house at the shops. A poster fell down, into a flame.
‘My whole wall got burnt.’ Her housemate put the fire out. If not for that housemate, ‘my whole room would have burned down,’ not to mention the rest of the house. When I looked up, the man with no shirt had taken his coffee and his bare chest and belly out into the cool, breezy day and disappeared. I was reading the foreword to a recipe book, Indian Spice. Its author Pinky Leilani described the importance of recipes in that culture, that they are handed down and closely kept secret. To cook well is a form of power and a source of income in a difficult, impoverished land.
She described how long it took before the family cook, a man in his sixties, had learned to trust her and share with her his recipes. He taught her to cook. Now she has published those secret recipes to the world, they belong to all of us and have lost their power, the power belongs to her. -
gulp it
Last night I went out for jazz and at the bar a man nibbling on the rim of his beer said thoughtfully, You are doing such a great job tonight. I said, Thanks! Then: Great job at what? Airily he said, Oh — just being yourself. When we all left he was standing at the far side of the suddenly bright room, waving goodbye with both hands. The music was like god.
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a man of mouse
In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large man came sloping in, one of those outsized softies whom I never used to see in Ghana, nor, for that matter, in Berlin: tall and stooping, strong but run to fat, crouching over his table as though he feared being forbidden to sit down. The same waitress came to him, scolding.
“You’re late! You’re usually here way earlier than this, what have you been up to?”
Meekly he explained whatever personal thing had altered his day. Doctor’s appointment, tenancy inspection. Once he had humbled himself to her aggression she softened, and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re here now, no need to make a fuss about it.”
The double-whammy! I sat back, impressed. She went on waitressing, he went on crouching and mooning, I went on writing, and then when he got up to leave and he and I had exchanged a wry smile I put out my hand as he passed by my table. “Can I say something?”
Sure, he said, submissive to the death. In an undertone I told him, “You don’t have to explain yourself to the wait staff, you know.”
He looked startled, then submissive once more. There is manhood there, but it’s lurking underneath. “Oh,” is what he said, “it doesn’t bother me.” And as I watched him shambling out of the cafe into the rapidly clearing afternoon rain I thought: It’s going to bother your next girlfriend, though: I’ll tell you that right now. Having to stand up for you, having to do all that mothering. Having to nudge you towards the manly adulthood without which she is unprotected in your relationship. Unprotected from sassy wait staff who like to subtly keep their customers hopping. Unprotected from other men. -
the men who hate women
Hi Callum! Good morning
I’d like to ask your advice as I don’t know now what to do with my free trial. Can we suspend it? Can I apply it to a different training group?
I attended two sessions at the riverside park with Chris. Was super looking forward to it and excited to commit to my fitness and wellbeing. There were incidents in both sessions which made me uncomfortable and Chris’s response has just been ‘good luck finding a new group.’ He hasn’t offered to tackle the issue and when I replied with a summary of what had made me so acutely uncomfortable I actually left early, he didn’t bother to respond at all.
I wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy. This is a female-based group in which women should be respected. We shouldn’t have to put up with our own trainer warning not to work too hard on our upper body strength because ‘Nobody likes a lady with a thick neck.’ A wave of disturbance ran through the women around me when Chris said that. Women’s bodies are our own. We’re not there for him to rate and deem more or less attractive. Women are entitled to be strong. We can be competent, powerful, fit, and active. If a professional personal trainer can’t uphold this, who will?
The second session a man standing beside me, huge guy, made an off-colour remark that I found very distressing. Being still out of condition, I lay down a moment on my mat. A woman said, hey, it’s not lying down time yet! And this man with a big smirk remarked, “Darl, it’s not that kind of establishment.”
Again, a ripple of unrest and disgust through the women present. Women were saying things like, Gross, that’s off, let’s all pretend we didn’t hear that. How disgusting that he feels it’s ok to evoke the spectre of prostitution and ‘establishments’ in which men have to bribe women for sex. How awful that even the trainer won’t speak up! (For comparison, imagine the trainer’s response if a customer made a remark of an equivalent level of racism). Women are used to being sexualised, at every opportunity, from the age of 10 or 11: most of us in this group were in our 40s, 50s and 60s so we have now been putting up with this trash for three or four decades. Why should we have to pretend not to hear sexist, degrading remarks which make women feel unsafe, in a professional training session which should be a safe space? We’re all wearing skin tight lycra and bending over with our butts in the air. It’s so upsetting that even here, your trainers don’t take care to make sure women feel welcomed and safe and respected.
I’ve told a friends and random women serving in shops etc about this encounter and their response in every single case was the same. Don’t be fooled by the fact that women are conditioned to think it’s pointless to speak out. We hate it.
Regards,
Cathoel Jorss
You might like to pass this on to your trainers to try to wake them up:
https://houseoflovers.com/literature/street-crimes/
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a man in the house
I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering of people I didn’t know, who regularly host discussions of thoughtful topics. In a little while I was deep in conversation with two women, one of us Chinese, one of us Brazilian, and we were so relaxed and open together that our peels of laughter attracted a man in a blue linen shirt. He came and joined us, and when the Chinese woman kindly made him part of our intimacy by explaining, we were talking about online dating and what a minefield it is for women, he said, “I wouldn’t know about that, I met my wife before all this happened.”
That is, rather than ask questions and be curious about the rapport which had drawn him, he winched the conversational topic out of our grasp and put it firmly inside his own experience.
In fact he wasn’t just conversing, he was pontificating, complete with didactic finger wagging and pompous tone. Within five minutes the man was doing all the talking as the three of us women supplied what Dale Spender has called ‘housework’. “So how did you meet? Wow, that’s interesting. Gosh!”
I pointed this out, in a friendly tone, thinking that in a group based on thinking, he might be interested to learn something from a perspective he has not considered. Instead he took immediate and lasting offense. “Or,” he said, “it could be that you just have a negative attitude.”
Some men, even whilst literally setting straight a group of women whose discourse they have interrupted and whom they don’t know, cannot bear to be resisted or corrected by any insubordinate females. Their only recourse is, I must hate men. Imagine being so accustomed to civil obedience that any disagreement must be read as hatred.
When I told him that in a group of people of colour talking about the experience of Blackness in a white-dominated world, he would not expect (one hopes) to come into a discussion and begin pontificating about his own experience, he looked blank. “This is no different to any other conversation I have experienced,” he said, and when I said, “Exactly my point,” he didn’t know what I meant.
Eventually the woman to my left, who is from China, graciously took him on so that the remaining two of us could return to our rapport. We talked until she had worked out what she wants to do with her career, having qualified in law in Brazil and her qualifications not considered applicable in Australia. This insight, which was merry and nourishing, arose through the free and open discourse in which strangers respected and made room for each other; if we had submitted without protest to the domineering man, we would have had a less pleasant afternoon and she might not have gained it.
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frat boys
A man I had been chatting with climbed on top of me as I was falling asleep after a party. It was at my friends’ friends’ place in the Hills so I had been offered a bed. I woke up to find him fondling and grinding on me. I have never been so tired and so alert at once. I knew there was only one chance. So I tried to reach him. As he reefed the blankets down I called him sweetheart and reminded him that he didn’t want to do this, we had been enjoying a real rapport, we liked each other, and he was not that kind of guy.
He may not remember this, but I do. He climbed off me, and said sorry, and went away. And I lay awake the rest of the night and fell asleep at dawn. So this guy toyed with the idea of becoming a rapist but decided not to. Every guy can decide that, too.
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morning inglorious
Standing on the street in my Dad’s old pyjamas taping a sign “GORSS” next to the labelled doorbell. The man who works next door is waiting with his hands in his pockets, wearing a paint stained smock. He is very good looking. We are laughing. “Always misspelt,” I explain, in German, jabbing at the tape with my finger. I am barely awake and people are walking past with their kids in little kid wagons, pushing their bicycles, walking their dogs. I’ve been away from Berlin a long time and clearly am eager to make a good impression.
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you my queen
“Oh my queen,” said a man walking behind me in the dark African night, and we both walked on a little. There are streetlights intermittent every four hundred metres or so and I have missed this dark. It’s beguiling and mysterious. It’s sexy. Faces loom out of it and I know so few of them.
“You, lady,” the same man said, and I turned. Me? His face was crumpled with disfigurement and he lifted his soft fingers bashfully when I waved. “Hello,” I said, and went on walking. “Oh,” he said, “oh yes, my lady.”
You arrive at the stall and say, Good evening. Good evening, say all three stallholders, and ‘good evening’ has four syllables. Carrying my purchases I went past the wheel rim up on bricks which is filled with glowing coals, where a lady with her head wrapped in cloth deep fries bubbling plantain patties. I went past the hardware stall the size of a wardrobe where a cheerful man also sells homemade local toffee (sugar cane and coconut) bound in clotted ropes of plastic like tiny frankfurters. The toffee hangs looped among the pipe fittings and elbow joints strung like vast ceremonial necklaces on long lines. Everything glows, to me, as though this were the world I walked out of at twelve, leaving Java, and since then had sought the wardrobe door.