Idiot(s) at the Bar

For the last few weeks, I have struggled with the readings.  Not because they are too difficult for me academically, but because they have heightened negative feelings I have.  The comic strip that was discussed in the Norton and Moffet article infuriated me, and the Williamson article was (actually) painful for me to read, yet when I discussed this with a (male) classmate to see if he’d had the same feelings he told me that he hadn’t.  Why? Because he isn’t a woman and therefore can only see the struggles of women as “analytical”.  Yet, it is not simply because I'm a woman these articles have resonated so deeply with me, but because of my experiences as a woman. 

However, what I struggle with is the disconnect between how I think I feel and how I actually feel.  I don’t think that I am oppressed, marginalized, or treated as a second class citizen, most of the time I feel strong, empowered and, dare I say it, equal.  Yet, if that were true then how could the readings that I mentioned above be so powerful for me?   What are these experiences?  I tried to think of some and I couldn’t come up with any examples.  With a heightened sense about where these feelings had come from, I went out on Saturday night with my friend.  I soon realised how I feel the way I do. 

My friend (who happened to be male) and I went to a bar in Seoul.  We sat down at the bar, it was late and we had had a few drinks at this point.  Facing us at the bar was this sticker: 

("put a little sex in your violence")

Of course, this sparked a reaction from me, so I started to talk to my friend about it.  We had both had different reactions to it, and I started explaining why it was so offensive to me.   

Whilst I was talking, I accidentally bumped the man sitting beside me at the bar, so I naturally turned and apologised, to which he scorned me for my “moaning” about the sticker, and I simply retorted that bumping him was an accident, I had already apologised and there was nothing more I could do. To which he replied:

“I hate Irish women”.  

I shrugged and laughed.  “I’m not Irish”. 

“I hate Scottish women then”. 

Again, I gave him the same reaction.  At which point his embarrassment at making himself look both stupid and ignorant whilst trying to make me look stupid and ignorant, he replied, “whatever.  Just another stupid woman with too much to say”. 

Wow!  I was (ironically) dumbfounded. I had nothing to say, let alone too much.  Yet, more ironically, I wasn’t even slightly surprised.  In that moment, I had a choice of how to deal with it, with him, with his words.  What good would it do me to enter into an argument with this guy who already thinks that women have too much to say?  However, what good would it do to remain silent and allow him to take away my voice because I was afraid that he would come at me with more remarks that questioned my femininity or 'womanness' as he sees them?  Whilst the whole time questioning why I even care what he thinks.  I wasn’t afraid of this man, yet I knew that his words could hurt me. 

My choice was to remain silent.  In which I both gained and conceded power.  He wanted to enter into an argument with me, and I wouldn’t allow it.  Yet, it didn’t feel like a victory.  And if it doesn’t feel like a victory, then is it even a victory at all? 

This was the point I tried (miserably) to make to Matthew in class on Saturday.  His perception of a person’s silence may not be their own perception of it.  The idiot at the bar, surely thought he had in some way beat me.  I’m sure he thought that his comment had made me realise that I did in fact have too much to say and that I’d better be quiet.  That wasn’t my reason for being silent.  I had nothing to say to him.  I didn’t want to enter into any kind of dialogue with him.  He was nothing to me.  Yet, I somehow managed to both challenge his words and uphold them at the same time.  If I think that I am challenging him, yet he thinks that he has won, then were my actions subversive at all?  Like with the discussion in class, if those who speak read others’ silence as a ‘lack of knowledge, understanding or intelligence’ then regardless of the actual reasons behind the silence, does it then come to mean what whoever names it chooses it to mean?  Of course, we judge others on our own standards.  Perhaps for those who speak often only choose to remain quiet when they lack knowledge and therefore conclude that others do too.  And, as Matthew, suggested, if he names the silence then can he influence others’ opinions about those people who refuse to defend themselves, verbally, against his comments?  My answer to that would be yes and no.  Obviously words can be influential and powerful, but I think that it is a massive underestimation of people and their ability to resist, question and reject what they hear (especially if what they hear seems an attack at what they are). 

However, what I struggled with after my experience with the idiot at the bar, was that despite me choosing my silence, if he interpreted a different way then it didn’t really empower me at all, did it?  To demand that someone enter into a dialogue with you because that is the only way you see that they can have power is, of course in many ways, oppressive, and was what was being suggested in class on Saturday.  Yet, is it at times necessary to enter into power struggles with a person in the only way that they see power in order to gain a small piece of it for yourself?  Or is this in itself conceding power?

Paradoxically, later on the same night, when my friend had gone to the bathroom, another guy came over and sat in his seat.  I, politely, told him that someone was sitting there and could he please move.  He wouldn’t.  “I just want to talk to you”, he told me.  To which I again politely told him that I didn’t want to talk to him.  At this point another guy in the bar, (not my friend) came over and told him to leave.  Oh my Knight in Shining Armor!  The first guy immediately apologised to him (not me) and left.  Why were this guy’s words so much more powerful than mine? Why did he deserve an apology and not me? Unlike with the idiot at the bar, where I had chosen my silence, this time I had chosen to speak and been ignored.  I clearly had no say over how this was going to go.  I didn’t want to be rescued anymore than I wanted to be spoken to, yet none of that mattered to the two men who had engaged in an exchange over me.  I was simply an object.  I didn’t want my silence anymore, but now I  had no voice.