With the exception of the boy, the last few months have been filled with me expressing disgust at general dude behaviour. That isn’t my fault! Everyone has been inundating me with stories and examples of men doing gross, unethical things. I’ve also had to play mother hen for some of my younger girls who’ve yet to develop the assertiveness to say no to creeps, and has led to me witness the yuckier side of dudes who insist on thinking with their pricks. All this has resulted in me to making wild pronouncements about how all men are disgusting etc, only half joking. I was definitely feeling a little disillusioned, a feeling matched only by that time when I was about 18, and all my girlfriends and I were just discovering that middle aged men think it is perfectly acceptable to hit on young girls. And when I say “hit on”, I mean request blow jobs even though they may previously have been a father figure/friend of the family/married/had children about the same age as us- and worse.
Yesterday afternoon while drifting about Chinatown with Sohi it occurred to me that I was perhaps being a little over-dramatic with my disgust. She was relating a story about some man who tried to strike up a conversation with the opening line “So, are you Chinese or Korean?” Sohi, who is neither, and a better human than me am in every respect, seemed mostly to object that this man bypassed all the preliminaries that are necessary to start a friendly chat, and not that he was possibly an Asian (or in Sohi’s case, Eurasian) fetishist looking for easy sex. That last part possibly sums up my deeply suspicious nature and my reaction to any dude who tries that angle (which is often by the way- I just assumed this was something all Asian women dealt with). Although my assesment is probably mostly true, it is also unfair. Anyway, I figured I should probably start behaving as if dudes are just, you know, trying to be friendly (misguidedly) without immediately assuming they have some evil agenda dictated by their cocks looking for a Bai Ling fantasy. Unless they skeeve me out.
In slightly more general dude musings, I’ve been wondering for months now about the bizarre fantasy world dudes must occupy when they’re straight and interact with the opposite sex. For instance, during my time in hospitality I’ve noticed men of all ages and cultures seem to believe that if a female under the age of 40 is serving them, this is somehow an act of flirtation- an offering, and therefore they are there for the theoretical-taking. It seems to be subconscious and mostly harmless; jokes about how their wives would “never do this for them anymore”, jokes at the expense of a single mate about how their waitress is his new girlfriend or girlfriend-substitute. One of the more bizarre variations of this was an encounter with a tipsy Asian businessman who constantly tried to hug and kiss the hand of every waitress on the floor, and who at one point insisted on escorting me princess-style up a flight of stairs (my left hand resting on his right), after which he thought he’d done the leg work to make a move. Often it’s not as obvious as that, just a certain expectation that it’s in the job description to flirt. So you do: you laugh and smile and respond as if you haven’t heard the same inane comments and jokes ten million times before. Maybe it’s not gender specific, I can’t say since I’m not a dude serving women, but I can’t imagine females automatically behaving as if service and sex are synonymous. I’ve brought this up with a few people and no one seems to think it is as weird as I do, so maybe I am the only one who finds this… perplexing.