Did he just say that? How do you talk to misogynists so they’ll listen?
I have never been so happy with all the wonderful angry women around me. I love a woman who is so over this patriarchy bullshit. Because I’ve been there for a long long time. Way back in 2015, when I was writing a book called Righteous Anger: Why American Women Should be Pissed and What They Can Do About It, the greater culture wasn’t really talking about feminism. (Believe me, I know, you can check out the kickstarter I did for the book here.) Seems like a million years ago now, doesn’t it? The point is that I have always been mad about this shit. And that’s great because as Audre Lorde wrote, “Anger is loaded with information and energy.”
Now that we are generating all this great collective anger, we can sometimes be hard-pressed to know what to do with it in our daily lives. I can call my congressman every day, but that doesn’t change the douche-y thing the guy at the bar says or the guy who looks you up and down so intensely, you feel violated or when your boss tells you “what women are good at.” The point is, I am working on how to deal with the more minute elements of the status quo. The guy at the bar. The guy on the street. The husband who never helps. The constant mansplaining we are on the receiveing end of. And I want to talk about what we do in those situations. That means you, yes, YOU, I wanna know about a time where you injected a little feminism into your daily life and how you did it.
Let’s go back a little. Let me tell you a story about an experience I had of…let’s call it “minor sexism.” (Sorry, I know none of it is minor, but there are differences between say a catcall and a highly qualified woman losing the presidency.)
I recently went on a date. It was fine. No sparks. Whatever. The usual. But here’s the thing, after the date, I realized that in the entire hour and half that we spent together in a local bar, this man didn’t ask me one question. Literally not ONE. Not what I do. Not where I’m from. Not anything. He talked after I asked him questions (you know like people do in a normal introductory conversation), but never stopped to get my opinion or find out even the most basic things about me. And this isn’t atypical. I talk to women who experience shit like this all the time. The funniest part of this whole debacle was that when I didn’t respond to a post-date text, I got a somewhat nasty “guess we’re never gonna speak again. Really sucks. I thought you were cool. Oh well.”
And my initial response is the one that is programmed in me already. Crap someone is mad at me. I did something wrong. I should have texted back and eased this man’s poor bruised ego. But being the feminist agitator that I am, I always try to think of what I could actually do about this kind of stuff versus just ignoring it (my chosen method with catcalls and weird tweeters, for instance).
But I realized, you know what? I don’t owe this guy a fucking thing. I am not obliged to text back. It would probably be polite. But as I saw it, my politeness ran out by the end of the date. I was nice enough not to get annoyed and walk out in the middle of the date, which I think was very polite given the situation.
And I kept thinking about what I could’ve said to him or how I could’ve said it. Or why I didn’t text my feelings to him. In my defense, I don’t know him, it may be a little overbearing to give him future dating advice. But I realized that maybe I was missing what could be called a “teaching moment,” as a cheesy corporate diversity “expert” would call it.
Maybe instead of ghosting or a polite blowoff lie, which is my go-to for nice guys that I’m not really into. In this case, maybe I was passing up an opportunity to possibly help this clueless man on his future dates? Maybe there was something I could say that would make him stop for a second and think about what it’s like to be woman, what it’s like when all signs are telling you that no one gives a shit what you have to say.
Now, I did what I always did when I wanna talk about anything, I go to my girls. I related the story to a friend and you know what happened? That amazing thing that happens between women when we know we understand each other. Like when I’ve rolled my eyes along with another woman, just a stranger at a bar, about something some douchy guy standing between us was doing. We have a bond in being women. Underlying everything, I believe strongly in that bond. My whole life is based on it. As it turns out, my friend had a very similar thing happen to her. Who would’ve thunk it?
She asked me what I wrote back to him after his text. And her face creased up a little when I said that I had done nothing, wrote nothing. When she asked me why surprised, I answered that I don’t even know how I would address the gender inequalities that existed in our having met for a drink once. I told her that I wasn’t really sure what to say. So she told me about how she once dealt with something similar and what she had done. And armed with the tools she learned in her own similar experience, I decided to text back and ask this guy why he thought I was “cool.”
HIM: You just seemed really cool?
ME: Anything specific?
(Time passes) (I’m sure he’s checking my profile now, his crib sheet for a person.)
HIM: I really like that you live downtown.
(Weak, I thought, but ok).
ME: Anything else?
HIM: And that you have a dog.
(I don’t have a dog, but I do have a pic with a dog on my profile.)
You seem like a nice guy and I am only asking these questions so that you realize you know almost nothing about me. It’s not just because we met once. Or because we found each other online and are basically strangers. It’s because in the entire course of our date, you didn’t ask one question about me. I’m sure you’d be hard pressed to say anything about me that you couldn’t find on my profile or glean from my pics.
Of course, he responded that that “wasn’t true at all.”
So I pressed him to say something else, which of course he couldn’t. And then I texted a long list of things I had learned about him on the date that were not in his profile. It was not a small list.
I ended the communication by writing, “While I don’t think we are a match, in the future, you may want to start thinking of women as people — who have lives and stories and interesting things to say too. Who knows…you may even learn something.”
I never heard a response from him (as expected). But I do think that on his next date, he may inquire where his date grew up or what kind of music she likes or even one of the myriad of other questions that exist to learn more about a person. Basically, I’m hoping that he treats the next woman like a person instead of like an audience.
This brings me back to my main point. In my current project, Did He Just Say That? How to Speak to Misogynists So They’ll Listen, I am chronicling women’s stories about what kinds of things they’ve said and done when they have experienced everyday misogyny. We all know it exists. We all experience it in one form or another, but the question is always…what do I do about it?
I’m not talking about Congress. And I’m not talking about social media, where we all revel in that wonderful crutch of not having to see someone face-to-face. We all know it’s harder to say things to our boss. Or our significant other. Or the guy who just whistled on the street that we don’t even wanna look in the eye. I’m talking about things we can actually say at work and in the world when we encouter this shit. Things that are more likely to be heard, things that may have made you feel like you got through to someone.
Here’s my ask: Send my your stories. What kinds of things have you experienced in your daily life and what have you said and done. Feel free to email me at allison@allisonkleinwrites.com.
Because navigating the world for women is often a very different experience than it is for men. And we need a kind of language to target it, to address it, to make any progress forward. Believe me, I’ve been studying women all my life and when the little day-to-day changes start adding up (women going into the workforce, military, congress, men doing more at home), that’s how change occurs. In little increments, in the things and comments (and texts) that we choose to respond to.
