Rights, equality and respect
The recent dust-ups around Donald Trump have caused me to remember a time from earlier in my life that seems worth recounting now. What to make of it, if anything, is up to the reader to determine.
I bought my first car at age 22. Not content just to have a car, it was brand new, and something of a statement piece. And, of course, it came with a car payment of substantial size. So I took a second job to help pay for it: I was a bartender at McCarthy’s Seafood House in Syracuse, New York.
I had no training at all as a bartender. They spent 15 minutes teaching me how to tap a keg, pour a beer, and what the shot prices were, and that’s all I needed to know. 95% of the orders we got were for shots or beer. “Girly drinks” — defined as pretty much anything else — were rarely ordered, and when they were there was a senior bartender there who could make them.
You see, the bar at McCarthy’s was a “stag bar” — something that has been illegal in New York (since 1982) and is also now illegal in 45 of the 50 states. It only served men. No women allowed. It wasn’t a gay bar, nor did any hookups take place there. It also lacked the kind of testosterone-laden back-slapping and exaggerated story-telling that is referred to these days as “locker room” banter. It wasn’t even so much a place where “men could be men” — whatever that means. Neither was it one of those dark-stained old wood cloisters where deals were made, networks sustained and careers launched. It was much simpler.
The clientele offered me a glimpse into my future: it was nearly all made up of grumpy old men.
And they were there for a single purpose: to get away from women. Whatever burden they felt from the presence of females was removed in that sanctuary. It was not a place of celebration, or of joy, but rather of quiet, if unspecified, relief. There were regulars, and some knew each other, but it was a clientele which largely drank in solitude.
I am told that women have similar outlets — the modern equivalent of sewing circles, one supposes, even if not in formal places like stag bars — where they can just get away from men.
Just something that seems worth remembering as we rightly congratulate ourselves on equality and respect among the sexes as we burn down and walk away from some of the abuses of the past.
