REALIZATION
1 May 2020, 08:44
So, I’m toddling along, like I’m apt to do, stopping at the round-a-about gas station in Hee Haw to get some fuel, hoping the Friday will fly by. As I’m social distancing in line, two young guys behind me, tittering and giggling, ask me if I was a lesbian. Clearly meant to be what passes down here as a comical bon mot, I turn to them and retort “Never thought of it till now….” and left them slaw-jawed and quiet. Well. More slack jawed.
I thought about this for a while, rolling around my head various insults towards the south and their ilk when a memory popped into my head.
I’m from the midwest, a fact I wear very proudly and arrogantly, especially since I moved to the south. I’m from a fairly metropolitan area, also another badge on my “I’m-better-than-you” sash. None of this really does make me better, it just makes me different, and I’ve always comforted myself with that fact, as I am a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Well, in my “superior” urban city, way back when, I was about 19 and in college. I was tall but skinny and probably looked my age or younger. Being the ever independent sort, and a feminista, I took up a profession where it is dominated by males, and a subsection ESPECIALLY dominated by males. I was a photojournalist. Ever haughty, ever sure of myself. Well, I was assigned by the newspaper to shoot pictures at the annual gathering of the drunks we call Riverfest, a celebration of our beloved, highly polluted river. There’s food, drinking, partying and throngs of people. Just. SO. Many. Of. THEM. I had spent the day navigating the unbridled mob down by the old muddy-and-unsanitary until the end of the day when the fireworks were scheduled to go off. I went to the tallest building in Wichita, or what we lovingly call it, Do Dah, so I could get really clear shots at explosionary level (yeah, that’s a word I made up). I’m not dressed provocatively, I have short hair, T-shirt, no makeup, lugging around about 30 lbs. of camera equipment and I get on the elevator to go to the top of the building. In the elevator, I wasn’t alone – there were two, slightly happy (re: inebriated) young men – I would say 20 to 30 years old. One turns to me and says “HEY, are you the HEAD photographer”. Being young, and somewhat innocent, I had NO idea what he was insinuating. I say no, and go about my business, leaving them cracking up in the lift. It wasn’t till DECADES later, I got the joke. What can I say, I’m a bit of a thicky.
I thought about this. I thought about the youngsters at the quicky-mart, today. I thought about what it was to be female. I am, by NO means, a Karen, or a militant feminist, nor am I girly-girl or Carrie Nation. I don’t think much about my gender. When the #metoo thing came along, I didn’t feel much of a personal connection. Until I thought about it. I had #metoo stories. I just didn’t know it. I’ve penned a few of them here. I have more, but, I never framed them as being something that was an systemic kind of thing, something gender related. I thought they were just things that happened to me. The grabbing, or manhandling, the comments, the intrusions, the unwanted advances, the things I had to fight off. These are things that happen to women all the time. These things happened to me a lot, only I just didn’t put it into context of this sort.
I thought about it, and what got me is that they felt they had the right to say something like that to me. They wouldn’t have said something like that to their moms (I hope) or to another man. I don’t think anybody in general would just say to a stranger “Hey are you one of dem gays?” Women have been conditioned to just brush it off, and not confront it, not rebutt it, not be offended, and be polite and quiet. We’ve been conditioned to take the blame for everything. Put aside the fact that I think they meant “lesbian” as an insult, of which I don’t understand and don’t find insulting, how did they think that was something all right to say to anybody? I thought more of ‘how the fuck did your mother raise you’, to let you think this was in any way, shape or form an acceptable way to talk to ANYBODY? It had crossed my mind that it was a southern thing because I’ve experienced this a magnitude more than I had in the midwest, BUT maybe since we midwesterners are a stoic quiet sort, this is a mindset they have too, but at least they fucking keep to themselves. So, its back to, who the fuck raised you not to know when to shut the fuck up.
I am, by no means, polite. I seem like a level headed, quiet lady-like person. I’m not. I have Denis-Leary-on-a-cocaine-binge continually screaming in my head, pointing out the inadequacies of everyone I meet. I’m pretty calculating as to when I finally just let loose. Maybe there was some subconscious calculus going on in my brain, keeping me quiet, polite, joking it off, so that I wouldn’t have to spend the extra 15 minutes this morning to extract a Nikon D700 out of this young man’s rectum after I had shoved it so far up there he wouldn’t be able to utter anymore nonsense to me. Ask anybody who has had the misfortune to be in a situation where the calculus led me to a different solution to a similar problem. Shit like this does happen and will happen again. To me. To other women. To young girls. Just not this morning. I’m not sure what I am ranting about, other than to scream at you people, is this how you raise your sons? Is this how you want your daughters, your sisters, your mothers, your wives to have to navigate through when strolling through life? Why is it that its the women that have to figure out if they are going to fight back or be polite? We shouldn’t even have to think about shit like this. But we do. More than I’d like to admit.
To Beavis and Butthead at the round-about today. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
