Two stories

These stories could easily sound catty, but that's not how I feel about them.

The more recent one was around the time of our 20-year reunion.

I was talking to one of the women who took Albert's advances most to heart. She was worried because he had said he was not going to the reunion. She was trying to get him to go, but he didn't.

She was also in contact with someone else from school, Ronny Kersey. 

I mention his name because we lost him in July and I don't remember seeing any classmates post about it. I was more aware of it because one of my former coworkers had served in the Marines with him. Small world, right?

There is a level at which I think talking about people as good or bad is reductive, but yes, I considered Ron a good guy. He was not as well-known at school, where I remember him as pretty quiet. Family and friends and other service members were really hurt by the loss.

For this woman, maintaining contact was not just being friends on Facebook, but messages and I think sometimes phone calls and maybe visits when possible. Losing two of them so close together would be very sad, but she left Facebook a while ago. I don't know if she even knows.

I lost contact with her shortly after the reunion. We were talking about whom we might want to spend more time with. I named someone else from our class and she turned a bit chilly. 

Apparently she liked him too. I guess she needed to have all of the single men, or at least until she secured one.

For this third single (specifically divorced, I am not sure how recent it was then) man, we had many perfectly fine interactions, but there is one really clear memory. It bothers me more now, though I didn't love it then. That brings us to the second story. 

I have told this story before, but not since 2008.

Leaving algebra class (still in junior high), I was joined in the hall by D. (I used a different initial in the 2008 telling, so both tellings could be too incriminating... I don't know.)

In front of us, one guy grabbed the butt of the girl he was dating, surprising her. She looked mad until she saw who it was, but they walked off with his arm around her shoulders.

D told me that once that guy got what he wanted from her, he would dump her. I don't know all of the details, but I could see that she had switched to hating him about two weeks later. 

When I have these really clear snapshot memories, I have since figured out that this was a moment when my mind was processing, "Oh, this is how the world works. That sucks." That's not to say that I really had full understanding of these moments, but that was the lesson I was taking. Part of them being such vivid memories is that the lessons I was learning sucked. 

I remember not knowing what to say. Years later, I think more about how D seemed to find it amusing.

Why? Because if she gave into the guy who was essentially her boyfriend, and acting like he really liked her, that made her stupid and slutty? Was I allowed to know that because I was such a good girl? Or was I such a non-threatening girl that it didn't matter what I was told?

(If it was because I never would have gotten it on my own, he had a point.) 

Was he amused that the boyfriend in question was kind of a douche? That's actually not funny when you consider how it affects other people. 

Isn't being a teenage girl hard enough? 

In terms of how to handle it, I cannot imagine that my trying to tell her would have gone well. We weren't close and I was not known for my dating expertise.

What really would have been great is if other guys were against that, where treating girls badly would result in social exclusion of some kind. 

If I could go back, I think I would have said something to D. "Do you think that's funny? That's horrible!"

I don't know if that would have done anything other than make me seem a lot less fun. Sometimes to make things better you have to be annoying and frustrating and irritatingly right. 

Does that mean raining down on other people's grief? Probably not in this case, and I am not trying to do that. 

It will absolutely involve other times of making people uncomfortable.

The last time I engaged with Albert where he tried to make me feel bad about my blog, it ended with something like "Maybe one day I'll get a mention in your ranting blog."

Well, you have some mentions now, and this next part may sound like a rant. 

First, though, I want to point out is that if there were people whom he was more likely to defer to -- either men with not knocking them politically or women with not hitting on them -- because of perceived talent or connections or greater popularity or marital status -- there are going to be things there that fit under dominator culture and quite possibly patriarchy but possibly not misogyny.

What I see most here is misogyny, which was a huge part of #MeToo and the lack of lasting changes.

For the few predators who have done jail time, there are a lot more who are excused or shrugged off and the victim pays a higher toll... that's possible because of the misogyny.

That male classmates could choose to not talk politics with Albert so they could have enjoyable interactions, but that female classmates trying to set a boundary like, Hey, don't go through my Facebook friends and start hitting on them, then had to face his Mr. Hyde version... that's misogyny.

That he could hit on I-don't-even-know-how-many women using the exact same words like they were all interchangeable and think that was perfectly okay while also being in a long-term relationship... misogyny!

Even that he would wait to hit on some classmates until they were divorced -- so respecting the perceived rights of a different man over them but not their own autonomy -- misogyny!

That he might feel that what he needed to do to gain validation was collecting interactions with many women, that is misogyny too. I don't think it made him happy, and it is worth noting that misogyny is not great for men either but -- call it bias -- I have a bigger issue with the effects of misogyny on women. 

And that a woman twenty years out of high school with an interesting job and plenty of things going for her would feel such a need for validation from a man that she would be excited about these crummy compliments, and keep going even when she started to know that his attention to her was not unique, and also would feel the need to back off from platonic relationships if there was a perceived threat to the mere potential of a romantic relationship... that relates to internalized misogyny.

I can be sad as well as mad.  

Related posts: 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/12/sex-education-314.html