My office is made up of five women, and I think not working with men has made me even more intolerant of some of the rank and casual unpleasantness that men can display. It came to the forefront at a party I went to this week.
A sixty-year-old man and his wife, both fit cyclists who loved to travel, were with us at the party. It came up in conversation that I used to be a racer. The man asked if I raced road or mountain, and I said mostly mountain.
"I should've guessed, you're not skinny enough to be a road racer," he said in a jocular tone.
I was pretty shocked by that and immediately told him in no uncertain terms that that was absolutely not something he should feel comfortable saying to a woman.
His assessment of my body didn't bother me, fortunately. While I'm not content with my weight, it's because I want to be stronger and fitter and more motivated, not because I want to be attractive to men. I don't have body hang-ups--I don't feel a need to apologize about the space I occupy.
Also, he obviously didn't know enough about cycling to know that, with the way racing works, a woman with some heft to her can make it a lot farther in the competitive road world than as a mountain biker.
I tried to think through why it made me so mad. I josh my male friends about their appearance. But I wanted him to understand that it's not his job or his right to observe me and tell me what he thinks about my body. I thought about one of my athletes, a girl who started out a little pudgy and is now a state champion in the throes of an eating disorder. What if this bozo had said that to her instead of me? That made my blood curdle with cold anger.
My friends' hackles were up too and they spent the rest of the night telling him how badly I could kick his ass on a bike. He seemed very sheepish and clearly didn't mean to sound like such a dick.
He never actually said sorry though. And then the next morning a guy we were giving a ride up to the ski hill showed up twenty minutes late and didn't apologize. Cy threw up his hands and said, "Men are terrible! Why don't they ever say sorry??"
The male gender continued to display its shittiness that evening. Later another guy, much younger, said that LeBron James was this century's Rockefeller. I said I thought that was a false equivalency, since LeBron built his fortune on talent and entertainment value rather than plundering the country's resources and using child labor. Suddenly this man started talking about how everyone who is not in the one percent is a slave, how we're all enslaved by our jobs and "the man," for lack of a more creative phrase. I think Cy and I both felt compelled by all the stuff we've read and listened to recently to speak up, to not let this person coast on his bullshit.
We both started arguing with him on his word choice, how it was flawed and stupid and inappropriate to misuse a word with so much historical baggage, how people who have to work for a living are very different from people who are bought and sold like chattel.
He pushed back hard and I felt for the first time like I was arguing with someone who trolls forums and Facebook. I interact with a lot of old school conservative people because of my job, but I had never talked to one of these put-upon alt-right men you read about in the left-leaning media. He was not interested in hearing what we said.
After Cy walked away too angry to continue, the guy informed me that he was a brainwashed liberal, which is truly laughable considering Cy grew up in a fundamentalist sect and his views have changed because he is compassionate and intellectually curious. I was shaking with fury the whole ride home.
Did I overreact? Or is it correct to keep holding these shitty men accountable for the stupid, thoughtless things they say? Is that how we fix a world where men have been unchecked for millenia? I really don't know.
