I was writing in a quiet corner of a Starbucks on Monday when a young blonde woman with a book took a nearby seat. She hadn’t even been there five minutes when a man, probably 20 years her elder and clearly a stranger, grabbed the chair next to her and started talking. About absolutely nothing. Dude literally opened with, “Mondays. The worst, right!?” It somehow got less interesting from there. It didn’t matter to him that this woman’s response was tepid at best, or that she was busy reading – an act that explicitly says: “I am choosing not to be in this universe right now.” He wanted her attention and it was her place to provide it. The guy was friendly, gregarious, poised (as if he’d been through these motions before) and even though he didn’t say a single sentence with any substance whatsoever, his delivery was studiously, unimpeachably innocent. He couldn’t be violating anyone’s boundaries – he was being “nice”! What’s next – are the feminazis going to outlaw smiles!?  The woman sat through it, subdued but polite. So he took and took and took, as much as he could get away with. Eventually, she left.  I was sitting there thinking about how women’s time is treated like a public commodity (yes, I am available for wedding toasts and bar mitzvahs) when, coincidentally, another young blonde woman came and sat down in the same chair. And then a completely different annoying old dude plunked himself down and launched into – I am not joking – a 30-minute, condescending lecture about the history of sampling in popular music. It happened all over again. He wanted her attention, so he took it. Because there’s no law against talking to a pretty woman. And, again, she sat through it.  Why is it that interrupting someone in a quiet moment, wilfully oblivious to their verbal and physical cues, is considered friendly, but rebuffing such an interruption is considered rude? Interrupting is objectively worse than not wanting to be interrupted. We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder. So why do we let this bizarre inversion dictate so many of our interactions?  Last week, the New York Post ran a pathetically slobbering profile of one Brian Robinson, a self-proclaimed (and self-published) “railway Romeo”, whose book How to Meet Women on the Subway purports to teach lonely men how to go on “over 500 dates” with women they find on public transit and then annoy them into submission. In other words, this dude’s favourite time and place to target women is when they’re trapped in a sealed metal tube buried three storeys underneath Manhattan. “There’s always beautiful women down here – tons,” Robinson explains, because nothing says “I respect women” like measuring them in bulk.  Attention, Brian; Starbucks blowhards numbers one and two; men in general. Here is a thing you need to internalise: just because you can get away with something doesn’t mean you should do it.  “Whatever I can get away with” is an inherently antisocial standard of behaviour. It strips your partner of agency and precludes any possibility of genuine intimacy. Why would you want to have sex with someone who is just “letting you” instead of eagerly reciprocating? Why would you want to be tolerated when you could be desired? Who’s OK with having sex that’s only distinguishable from rape on a technicality? (Ooh, I know that one. It’s rapists.) That’s why California’s new “yes means yes” law is so exciting – not because of its legal ramifications so much as its ideological ones. Shifting the way we conceptualise our interactions from “I should fulfil as many of my own desires as I possibly can without getting in trouble” to “I should go out of my way to make sure the people around me feel comfortable and respected” has repercussions far beyond the romantic realm.  Michael Mark Cohen has a cleverly articulated essay on Gawker this week in which he declares “douchebag” the only effective signifier for a particular brand of toxic, entitled white male. (He calls it a “racial slur”, a tongue-in-cheek flourish that will surely validate many white racists with martyr complexes.) “The douchebag,” Cohen writes, “is someone – overwhelmingly white, rich, heterosexual, male – who insists upon, nay, demands his white male privilege in every possible set and setting. The douchebag is equally douchey (that’s the adjectival version of the term) in public and in private. He is a douchebag waiting in line for coffee as well as in the bedroom.”  Douchebag supremacy is built on a long history of getting away with as much as possible – in finance, in romance, in literature, in humour, in politics, in the countless subtleties of simply taking up space in the world. If you can get away with it, good. More for you. Generosity and basic decency are favours, not obligations. It’s an isolating idea, the inverse of empathy. It’s also the reason why traditionally male-dominated communities such as gamers feel so threatened by female voices, and why progressive cultural critics are branded the “thought police”. Because getting away with it is getting harder all the time.  The Post asked Robinson if he has experienced any memorable rejections, and he replied that a woman once threatened him with mace to get him to stop talking to her. That’s how much it takes to stymie a douchebag’s entitlement. He seemed to find it amusing. Typical female overreaction. But the truth is, he almost got a face full of poison. He almost didn’t get away with it. And, some day, he won’t.
Lindy West: The ‘railway Romeo’ targets women who are trapped in a sealed metal tube underground. Guys: women’s time and space is their own – don’t be a douchebag