Entitlement

I went to Cowboy Monkey last night to see Shipwreck, Page France, and Headlights, all excellent local bands you should check out. But I had a really creepy experience that had a lot to do with entitlement and sexism. I was sitting at the bar keeping track of all the winter coats and paraphernalia of the group I was with, who are all bigger fans and had gone up to the stage. I noticed this older (30-ish) guy walk around me, looking at me, and sit down behind me. I switched seats so I could see the stage better, and to consolidate the stuff I was watching. One of my friends came back and sat down in my old seat and we chatted a bit over the music. Out of the blue the guy puts up a hand and manages to slur out between swigs of his drink, “You know, I could say something about the two of you…” “what? Go ahead.” He mumbled incoherently and we exchanged a few words. But there were two things he managed to say clearly that really disturbed me. Very early on he said “You know, I just can’t help it if you’re a hot woman and I’m just, you know…” This kind of thinking is so irritating on so many levels. One, it blames me just for being female while absolving him just because he’s male. Power imbalance, anyone? Two, dude, get some self respect. Do you really have that little self control that you can’t close your mouth when someone is clearly being hostile and avoiding you? You really think that little of yourself?

The second thing he said, with astonishing clarity and force given his intoxication, he said while my friend had gone to warn the bartender that if they didn’t stop serving the guy she was going to have to deck him, because he had started trying to touch me. “It’s just, you know, it’s, -- You can’t, legitimately, challenge me. You know it.” “Says who?!” I replied, mouth agape. He didn’t have a response aside from an eyeroll, and then she was back and I told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to go somewhere else at the bar.

This kind of thing is why I can sympathize with feminist separatists. Regardless of whether every man has this kind of mindset, it is clearly a virulent strain of sexism that persists today, the kind that says that a man who chooses to treat a woman as a human being entitled to some kind of dignity is just restraining himself, offering her charity, and that he could rescind that at any moment he chose. He remains in power because he can choose how to treat her. It would be easy to just say that this can’t be fixed, that we can never undo something so pervasive and we should just start over on our own.

But then I think that ties into allies of all kinds. Men are supposed to be women’s allies in the fight against sexism. But they could choose to take back their power at any time. In thinking about my own status as middle class and white, it makes me understand why people who aren’t would be suspicious of me.

Realistically, I know that allies of historically oppressed groups have often been instrumental in creating change. Alliances across groups can be powerful things. But I still think it takes a certain amount of trust, or faith, in other people to make things work. And I guess I’m not really sure where that comes from, or how to build it.

The other thing that really bothered me about the whole thing was that it kind of ruined the whole concert for me. From that point on I had to be on watch, just because I was female and had left my house. And I did so with good reason- within the next half hour he walked past me twice more, looking me up and down both times and then came back a third time to go around behind me and slowly creep closer. I didn’t even realize he had done that until my girlfriend said “oh my god is that him?!” to which I turned around, found him within six inches of my face, and grabbed the wrist of the hand he had just put on my back, slammed his hand on the bar and said “GO! It’s a big bar, get away from me!” Today he probably doesn’t even remember doing any of this, and I’m still on edge. There’s that power imbalance again… What can we do about it?