I went back to the coffee shop today because it is my coffee shop and because I am a frugal person in possession of free coffee cards. The men were once again holding forth on the Weinstein revelations–“bla bla, if the women took money, they shouldn’t be complaining now; bla, bla, why didn’t they stand up for themselves at the time?” I had forgotten my headphones so, though sitting apart from them, couldn’t help hearing hearing their male entitlement mishegos. The female barristas were held hostage since they couldn’t yell at customers without jeopardizing their jobs; the mothers were shaking their heads as their toddlers played; the millennials were hunched over their devices trying to ignore the misogyny broadcast. The men rambled on loudly–“you gotta understand, women can’t have it both ways”– ironically luxuriating on the cockacratic continuum whose existence they were denying. Reader, I blew up. “You fucking guys, why don’t you just give it a rest? The rest of us don’t want to hear your sexist bullshit, did that ever occur to you?” and so on, and so forth. At one point one of them said, “Your generation of women don’t listen well enough. That’s why you can’t make relationships work. We’re used to women who know how to be wives.” At which point this spinster in a fur hat really blew up. “THE GOOD OLD DAYS WHEN WOMAN COULDN’T HAVE OUR OWN BANK ACCOUNTS? OR BETTER YET, WHEN WE COULDN’T VOTE? FOR FUCK’S SAKE WE’RE DAMNED IF WE DO AND DAMNED IF WE DON’T. IF WE SAY SOMETHING, WE’RE BLACK-BALLED BITCHES. IF WE DON’T, WE’RE BLAMED LATER FOR NOT STANDING UP FOR OURSELVES.” Continue Reading →
Archive | Feminist Matters
Coffee Cockacracy
I went into the coffee shop this morning to find my usual morning crew–all male, mind you–hashing out the Weinstein revelations. One was calling Meryl Streep “a bitch” for not publicly denouncing Weinstein before (“she had to know!”); another was saying, “hey, men are disgusting; what do you expect?” I thought about where to position myself in the conversation since we normally debate everything. Should I expend precious energy by pointing out the painful hypocrisy of calling a woman a gendered, hateful insult for possibly doing what many, many men in Hollywood might have done as well–namely, not investigate rumors/allegations? Should I point out that the “boys will be boys” argument has been used to rationalize everything from mansplaining to stalking to rape? I grabbed my Americano, said, “Y’all are pathetic” and walked out, feeling nary an inch of remorse. I pray for a time when male entitlement–and this includes shooting your mouth off in public without assessing your audience’s receptivity–is in the rearview mirror.
Two With Nature
I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, raised by two parents who kept their eyes on the city as they shuffled their kids to soccer practice and suffered through PTA banality. Both my mother and father came from working-class Northern Massachusetts mill towns, and found in 1960s and ’70s Boston a glorious burst of music and color and matter-of-fact magic. They moved to Newton, 15 miles west, so my sister and I could benefit from the town’s excellent public school education. And an excellent education we did have, though I, the eldest, kept my eye cocked on the city as well. I loved sun trailing through freshly cut grass, smoke entwining with drying leaves, ponds beckoning not far from our house. But I felt my parent’s ambivalence as by osmosis.
I craved action.
My high school paper won a national award my junior year, and when the staff went to Columbia University to collect it, I broke off from the other editors and took the 1/9 train down to the Village. It was the late ’80s and the city had not yet been hemmed in by Guiliani and superstores. Second-wave punk, hip hop, and gay liberation reigned supreme, as did one-dollar coffees and broken park benches flanked by buildings as trees. I borrowed a Walkman from a friend, and walked through that heat, heart, hopeless hope with Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love rising in my ears. Back home I was already fucking a cruel and beautiful man, and when he’d hit me and I hadn’t left him, I’d stopped believing I could fit anywhere good. But as I walked through New York that day, I saw there could be another way. Continue Reading →