Part Then:
Well then, no more dilly-dally, let's get to it. (Was what I was thinking at the end of the night.)
Off I went to Kreuzberg, specifically the U-Bahnhof Görlitzer Bahnhof. It was around there that T., a recently re-discovered friend from high school, had invited some of his friends to present him with gifts and happiness. And since he has a girlfriend I figured the other thing that makes you happy was food, and for T. specifically: meat. So I brought a cook book, GU's Meat Basics, which I myself like very much. And thus one topic dominating my night was established: vegetarianism, the benefits of eating meat, the supposed elitism of a tv chef proposing that meat should be a luxury item again, the benefits of buying bio-products vs. those of buying local (which, strangely enough, very often does not coincide), &cet. p.p. This was before I had explained to me how I was living the most privileged life on earth.
When I arrived, there was T. with his girlfriend and magnificent-woman-all-around W., and there was whom I would come to know as The Thirtysomething Heterosexual White Underprivileged Male. I also gathered that he did something with music though I can't be sure if it was professionally or privately. And after a while, when the both of us were standing, I realized he was short. I should have known, though, the way he said the things he said and the way he argued against or for something – the way he argued mostly against me. Lest you believe that I am thrown by anybody standing their ground against me argumentatively, you should know that in my family we've always cultivated a climate of vigorous and passionate debate, which quite regularly turned into full-on family fights, with shouting matches, the banging of doors, curses and, sometimes, a return to the issue in question -- the whole nine yards, really. Imagine this exponentially intensified by two lawyers (who are professionally trained to argue) in the family, a literary scholar, all mainstream political affiliations, a moody youngster (who, most probably without being aware of it, discovered the Socratic method for himself, albeit in a microcosmic, concrete way, where he does not discuss the relative merits of one position over the other but instead asks questions aimed at making you lose yourself in details of which he then cherry-picks one to ask a question about again, all in the hopes of making you contradict yourself or your argument inconsistent – and if it doesn't work the first time, he just picks another detail to ask a question about, repetite ad infinitum), a huge amount of books read and digested, and a lot of thick heads. So I can hold my own, I really can. But this guy. This fucking guy.
In the beginning all was good. After I arrived the four of us made a little small-talk, other people kept arriving, we talked mostly as a group until we didn’t fit around the table anymore. Smaller groups formed and kept re-forming. At some point I sat with The Thirtysomething Heterosexual White Underprivileged Male Fucker (referred to hereinafter as “Thwumf”) and another friend of T.’s, a three-time father, vegetarian and thoughtful. I, ever the conversationalist, decided to tell the story of the lunch-break masturbator whom I happened to come across a few days before. (Let me explain: I was sitting, during my late lunch hour, at the Spree; it wasn’t a sunny day so there were few other people there. I was reading the news on my cell phone when behind me there was a quiet commotion: some youngish guy was breaking through the admittedly very light and trimmed bushes and looking around questioningly. After a few minutes, when I had neither heard nor seen him leave, I turned to look if he was still lurking in the bushes, which would have made me uneasy, seeing as the only other person in my direct vicinity had just left the next bank a few meters over and disappeared from view. The guy in the bushes was still there alright, but he wasn’t exactly lurking. He was standing between me and the bushes, approximately one and a half, maybe two meters away from me, his penis in plain view, rubbing one out.) I had told the gist of this story earlier that night when there had been only a few of us yet and I had – stupidly, I admit – added that the guy didn’t look like what I imagined a public masturbator would look like. Again, I admit this was stupid. I got called out for that, and rightly so. Anyway, when I mentioned this story to the thoughtful vegetarian father-of-three, The Thwumf kind of went off on his own very idiosyncratic, very provocative-for-the-sake-of-being-provocative and at least to me very inappropriate tangent about why I find this experience unpleasant, what about the masturbator’s feelings, about there not really being anything wrong with what happened as I didn’t suffer, didn’t get hurt and have no loss in quality of life, about how I would have reacted if it had been a woman fondling herself, if it had been a couple having sex, and some more aspects in this vein. I couldn’t react fast enough before he brought up the next hilarious point which makes me think now (unfortunately I was too caught up feeling like I had to defend myself for not liking being jerked off to in public to realize it at the time) that he really wasn’t interested in an intellectual or even ethical discussion of sexuality in public spaces or the inherent difficulty and fragility of defining what constitutes a transgression, be it in legal, ethical or general terms. I guess now that he was not comfortable with me making a stupid and judgmental comment like “he didn’t look like a public sexual deviant”, but was neither willing to reflect why this is the case nor interested in debating constructively why and how there might be different understandings of personal space and transgression and whether or not there is the possibility of coming to a shared fundamental basis. Anyway, that was the point in my relationship with The Thwumf when the whole thing took a dark turn. My mind was racing, I didn’t know where to turn first argumentatively, and didn’t stop to realize that in no way was I required to defend myself. Nor was I required to explain to The Thwumf how women have been and in many regards still are being disenfranchised in modern industrial societies. I don’t mean to compare hardships or make a competition of victimhood, but hearing somebody, anybody say, flat-out say, as The Thwumf did, that women are not being and have not been marginalized, that in fact women are the most privileged beings in modern industrial societies, left me white-hot with rage and also speechless. Literally speechless. At some point I was so fed up that I did what I hate when it is done to me: I said that we should stop talking about this whole thing, that I did not want to talk about it anymore and frankly saw no point in discussing this further. I don’t have (m)any regrets about that night but I do wish that I would have kept my cool, grown evilly quiet and logical and torn him to shreds intellectually as I am sure I would have been able to. In retrospect I begrudge him the victory – for I am sure he perceives it thusly.
What I’ve come to realize is that I was forced to live through a tiny, miniscule fraction of what I imagine rape victims must go through. Again, for purposes of clarification, no physical harm was done to me, the feeling of being violated I suffered was teeny-tiny and entirely subjective, and I in no way mean to compare myself to or put myself on the same level as victims of rape or attempted rape or sexual abuse or …
I do, however, understand in a very limited way how the feeling of being abused or used or victimized might not be the worst about any transgression, but the feeling of having the blame, or even part of it, heaped upon you, of having the transgression talked down, minimized, trivialized, and of being told that maybe it wasn’t all bad, maybe you’re overreacting, maybe you’re being unreasonable or too sensitive, &cet.
In light of all this, experiencing The Thwumf being what I perceived as purposefully glib and polemical for the sake of either derailing me or belittling me – and expressly not for the sake of the discussion – made me so angry that I did not and could not keep engaging with the Thwumf. So I didn’t.
A little later, after having talked to W., who used to be flatmates with The Thwumf, and after having found out a little about The Thwumf’s backstory, which, incidentally, might explain some of his positions, but which did do nothing for me to accept or indulge his behavior, I talked to another guy there, let’s call him The Nice Guy, and told him about the masturbator and The Thwumf’s reaction. He was having none of it. He himself told me a story of having been the object of a public masturbator’s attention and how he felt uncomfortable about it, too, and when The Thwumf, who strained his neck to overhear what I was telling The Nice Guy, jumped in to clarify his position, The Nice Guy delivered when I hadn’t been able to: he fired broadside. The Thwumf tried to do the same thing again he did with me and The Nice Guy tried his best to counter him.
Alas, it was all for nothing – The Thwumf didn’t really want to argue, he just wanted to provoke. And feel superior, I guess. The Nice Guy grew more and more enraged and I grew more and more uncomfortable, one, because I put him in this position, and two, because I didn’t intend to start any animosity amongst the birthday guests. But, I have to admit, it was a good feeling to have somebody else there who experienced similar things and who has similar reactions – to me, who has never fully trusted her own instincts and who lets herself be unsettled quite easily, it meant I wasn’t wrong, my instincts weren’t wrong, my evaluation of two entirely different situations (the masturbator, The Thwumf) was not wrong – it meant that I could trust myself a little more.
At some point The Nice Guy got so fully exasperated because of The Thwumf (who, by the way, disqualified himself further by pulling exactly the same moves with The Nice Guy, another Thirtysomething, White Male appearing on the Underprivileged-spectrum on the same level as The Thwumf, that he pulled with me, a more privileged being than himself – there you have it!) that we went inside. Fabulous girlfriend all around W. then tried to mediate a little, which The Nice Guy, being the nice guy that he is, accepted and welcomed, in part taking it as a chance to air out his grievances to a third party just as I had done with him, but I was having none of it. I was, quite frankly, neither interested enough in The Thwumf to keep discussing him further nor was I willing to grant him any leniency whatsoever. I was being a stubborn bitch at that point, and I stand by it.
How I came to be propositioned, how I met the pretty blue-eyed Estonian physicist with the great hair and why dilly-dallying is not for me, this will all be revealed in Pub Med, Part After.
