Coffee and Cake. Mansplaining and Misandry. How the gender wars are getting out of hand.
When the cafés are the battleground, misogyny and misandry are in danger of becoming the defacto form of entrenched warfare.
The cafe was busy and I’d finished my flat white and muffin before you both arrived. The caffeine and chocolatey goodness was payment for an hour with the young lady sat opposite. An informal chat between relative strangers. She was at least a decade younger than me (not that it matters) and an aspiring playwright.
She had leveraged the power of her social network to find me. I’m a friend of a friend. All those self-help books had paid off and she was leveraging her social contacts. She’d asked if I could read her latest play and tell her what I thought. She did this because she’s an aspiring playwright and I’m a published playwright. Our careers are in different places. Our lives are in different places. Our coffee and cake came to the same table.
The request was polite and the promise of coffee and cake offered as part of an exchange. Being a self-confessed procrastinator and a chocoholic, I agreed straight away. In retrospect, I was too keen to get away from the laptop and should have held out for a second coffee.
