I Was Punched in the Stomach at a Vampire Weekend Concert and It Made Me Angry at the Patriarchy

I have attended a Vampire Weekend concert alone, and am twenty-two, and have quickly learned upon entering the venue that people who go to Vampire Weekend concerts are young. I’d firmly believed I was young until this day, but I was wrong. These are the new Kids. I hear a voice in the crowd say “they’ve been my favorite band since, like, elementary school,” and I’m so discomfited that I do the math to see if that’s even possible. It is, but I’m not happy about it.

So I’m standing alone and amused in a sea of teenagers, tweeting pretentious things and bopping up onto my toes now and then to make sure I will be able to see Ezra Koenig’s face, because it’s a very important face for me, and suddenly I’m punched in the stomach. It hurts a lot, and I briefly wonder if I’m just feeling my feelings really viscerally these days, but no, it’s a very real fist in my gut. A boy fist in my girl gut. A stranger fist in my own personal minding-my-own-business gut. It’s not awesome.

The young man standing in front of me has punched me in the stomach, hard, and now he keeps shouting, “My wallet!” His girlfriend, who has an X on her hand but who declared earlier that “you can tell who is really young because they still have acne,” is now speaking very fast and saying, “Baby, it’s just me, it’s just me, baby, it’s okay, babe, babe, it’s just me.”

Evidently, what’d happened is that the girlfriend put her arm around the guy’s back, resting her hand on his pocket. The Owner of the Fist, upon feeling movement near the pocket that presumably held his wallet, flipped.

I can’t say whether he was thinking that whoever attempted the assault on his pocket needed to be taken down, and so he began swinging at random, or if he believed that I, the girl standing behind him, must be the perpetrator of this imagined attempted crime and so he aimed at me intentionally. I don’t think this detail matters overmuch, but I admit it felt like a punch with some direction.

Right. So I’ve been punched, and a lot of young people are staring, and so far all he has said to me is an angry and defensive “I felt someone taking my wallet.”

I’m rather dumbfounded: “It’s…cool…”

What?! It’s not cool. He didn’t, say, accidentally step on your foot. He punched you! On purpose!

I amend: “…I guess? I mean, dude, you fuckin’ punched me in the kidney.” This is less of an aggressive accusation though, and much more of a meek and bewildered mutter. Sisters are doin’ it for themselves, indeed.

His face grows incredulous, and he just keeps raising his eyebrows higher and snidely repeating, “I don’t know what to tell you. I thought someone took my wallet. I don’t know what to tell you!” He’s really quite angry with me. His girlfriend has to turn him around and guide him away.

I don’t know what to tell you? Tell me you’re sorry, you jerk, and please don’t couch it with a bullshit “I guess.” But I don’t say this and instead smile insincerely and look away. The whole event is very muted, really, considering it’s a sudden act of violence in a public place, and it quickly dissolves into nothing. The show begins and is excellent and ends without incident. But I continue thinking about being punched, as minutes and hours and days pass, and I get angrier. Angry at how, even after the details of the situation had been cleared up, after it was established that I had shit-all to do with that feeling in his back pocket, he still felt wronged, still felt like he’d made the right choice, and still refused to genuinely apologize.

I mean, it’s a bad enough thing, punching an innocent person in the stomach, that even if he’d apologized immediately and profusely, I still would have been allowed to be pissed. But then, to remain stalwart in his belief that this potential threat, not even to his physical person but to his finances, deserved an actual expression of violence against someone who may or may not be (and definitely was not) responsible?

That’s pretty vile. And it’s a significant sort of vile because it’s representative of one of the many ways that ingrained sexism plays out in our lives. On the extreme end, take the MRAs and the not-all-men men, who believe so passionately that a possible threat to them is more valid and of more concern than a very real instance of violence against someone else. The possibility, for example, of one man being falsely accused of rape is of more concern than the scores of actual rapes that have been experienced by women. That potential injustice against a few of them, they believe, demands that justice be refused to those who have actually been violently harmed.

It’s just as much a problem even for the “good” men who try to “do the right thing” but can’t manage to get invested in stopping sexual assault until they hear “what if it was your daughter or your sister,” or who can’t be convinced a female protagonist would interest them, or can’t be brought on board as a feminist until they learn about how feminism helps men, too.

Since men are the default and women are othered and special-interest-grouped, the male experience gets disproportionate respect and recognition. The male experience just matters more. And the male self is more protected. Is, in a lot ways, weaker, because it doesn’t have to put up with the varying threats that women so often do. So the idea of being violated in even the smallest way is terrifying to many men, and they often fight back so aggressively that they harm others in their defense. Patriarchy, you guys. Shit.

My gut-punching incident was a little microcosmic representation of this unpleasantness. The juxtaposition of The Gut Puncher’s response and mine is darkly comic. Practically self-satire. He was so passionate in his feeling that he didn’t deserve what had happened to him — which was that he got caressed by his girlfriend and did not get robbed but thought he got robbed — that he became violent and unapologetic and believed it was his right to hurt a stranger. Damn straight, he will defend his right to punch an unfamiliar woman in the stomach because he felt a jostling near his pocket!

I, on the other hand, despite feeling that I didn’t deserve what happened, had this immediate understanding that this is just life and you gotta roll with it, even though you really don’t gotta roll with a stranger punching you in the stomach for no reason. And it gets worse. I spent much of the rest of the concert chastising myself for not speaking up about why I definitely was not the perpetrator of the nonexistent crime. I’m an adult with a real job, why would I want to rob some scuzzy college kid? I wasn’t even looking in that direction!

My esprit de l‘escalier, in this instance, was a defense, as if I was on trial. As if I was guilty. I felt guilty, both for the crime I didn’t commit and for how I didn’t protest my innocence strongly enough. Since I didn’t argue or make a scene, I was worried that people thought I really did try to steal his wallet. If you don’t fight back, you’re guilty.

So he was the definition of entitlement while I was the definition of shame. He was entitled to feel safe and unthreatened in every way at all times, even if it meant sacrificing the safety of someone else. I was ashamed of ending up in a situation over which I had no control and not protesting strongly enough to seem innocent. It’s honestly embarrassing. I’m a feminist. I’m outspoken, and a smart debater, and not afraid of what other people think of me. And I let myself down, hugely, by slotting into the easiest position available, which was the one of an inferior, of someone who deserved that punch in the stomach.

This stuff is ingrained, and making it better, I’m realizing, is not as simple as just knowing it’s there. You have to be fighting in little ways all the time, and you have to fail often. You can’t always be perfect, and sometimes you end up sacrificing your own values and your own worth for the sake of smoothing things over and not causing a fuss, and that sucks.

Unlike Vampire Weekend, who are a fucking delight.