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A young guy came into the bookshop where I work. He proceeded to ask if we had various imaginary sounding books, which we didn’t, and then he “cut to the chase” and asked where we kept our erotic fiction, except that he didn’t call it erotic fiction and he refused to believe that we didn’t have any. And, without getting into detail, this escalated to the point where this lucid appearing individual asked, explicitly, about various novels, art books and videos that we might have that could help him get off, made various assertions about how I knew what he was talking about and how he knew what I liked, culminating in my basically being cornered (behind the desk) then propositioned. He only left when I phoned the police.
At this point I’d spent all morning reorganising the academic section of the store, getting ready for the students coming back, boxing up 200 books that were going to be used as props in a BBC film, and dealing with several large boxes of cognitive philosophy, on top of the usual stuff. This was mid-afternoon and I hadn’t had any lunch yet. I didn’t need anything else today, thank you. I didn’t need to deal with fuckwits taking up my time, making me feel uncomfortable and defensive, for a process which achieved precisely nothing.
And despite being tired, and hungry, and having far too much to do (for such is a bookseller’s life, alas), I managed to stay civil to this person. Although… that’s not actually true, I was trying to help him as best as I could, rather than just telling him to get lost, but when it was becoming more clearly an incident verging on sexual harassment I think I said something like “This is either a prank or you’re an idiot” so I didn’t even really get the cool, calm collected professional demeanour right. So it was a bit of a muddle really. But at first, and it seems bizarre now, but I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t want to come off deeply prudish or conservative, or to give this guy a hard time because he was looking for something most people would see as unconventional. So I was like, “hey, no, no I don’t think we have any of that them there hardcore gay pornography, but you could always have a look over there, yes, no, sorry, no…” And it’s not like I find the idea of being approached for the hot, casual man-on-man sex wrong in principle, there’s just a time and a place and a way of asking, and this wasn’t it.
When he actually became quite seriously abusive, I was already locked into trying to deal with it professionally, and with civility, and persisted without submitting to the desire to beat him around the head with one of my shoes. But reflecting upon it I felt quite constrained by the idea, which I think I had grabbed onto with a certain degree of anxiety and confusion, that I had to try and remain discursive with this man, that I had to try and give him every last benefit of the doubt. Which I think is one of those unpleasant squirming instances where you find yourself reacting as an individual in a certain role rather than as yourself. I found myself communicating vacuous things approximate to “This conversation is, uh, making me feel uncomfortable” and “I am, uh, like, unable to continue this conversation if you continue to say what you are saying about those things you are saying in that, uh, way… ok?”. I’d been reading a small set of short stories by Brett Easton Ellis the night before but it’s no excuse.
As it turns out it was, literally, a joke. A woman (who appeared unaware of what he’d actually said) came in later and explained that it was a staged incident for an entertainment show on satellite tv. I said no to the use of the material (obviously), but I was still too frazzled to actually get any details about the show, and y’know, do anything about the methodology of this modern proponent of dark, edgy humour. I mean, what were you thinking? I work in a small but respectable bookshop. I’m a representative of a children’s charity. I was not a likely candidate to invite you into the back room or to produce a stash of surreal TV-worthy dirty books. You walked into that shop, you saw that I was working on my own, and you worked out how far you could push it with this square-looking bookshop guy, how uncomfortable you could make him feel, how distressing a scene you could make in a situation where he couldn’t just walk away, and you pushed it to the point where either he would call the police or initiate a confrontation.
And because it was for television that makes it ok, and because it was for television it makes into a surreal and somewhat absurd anecdote rather than harassment? So now I don’t just have to deal with difficult customers but on top of that with fake difficult customers as well, who have an agenda of making me feel manipulated and stupid!?
And what really infuriates me now is that it could have been someone I work with far less comfortable dealing with that sort of situation that the guy could have cornered. It could easily have been one of my female co-workers (not that that should really make a difference, but for historical reasons I’d be even less comfortable with a man acting in that way towards a potentially more vulnerable woman), or someone that had suffered abuse/harassment in the past, he decided to make feel uncomfortable. In short, he could have done that to someone to whom it wouldn’t be a somewhat rattling experience to be forgotten about by the next week, he could have done it to someone who had a history of incidents like these, and in the manner he did it it could have been fairly traumatic.
Far worse things happen. There are more serious instances of sexual harassment, abuse and general assault that I’m sure many here are personally familiar with (btw Miss W, I really hope everything goes ok with the surgery, and the repercussions of the incident are as minimally serious as they can be), and greatly more consequential victimisation. But it was for nothing? The net benefit was nothing? We accept and hope to change a certain amount of casual evil in the world but the bizarre and trivial act of not just tricking or embarrassing people but actually harassing them to the point of distress leaves me gasping with its sheer vicious pointlessness. And you could have done that to someone for whom the memory will not be completely, utterly erased by the time the next West Wing or Doctor Who box set arrives, you thoughtless, thoughtless bastard.
But even if this was just a very small taste of what it can be like to belong to a less privileged social group than I do, even if comparatively this is Nothing. At. All. this was still not a day when I felt particularly well-equipped to deal with your detournement of my professional life; I was at my wit’s end, I had better things to do, and my awareness of a person’s right to liberty of space and movement was just fine without your penetrating analysis, thank you. And now I feel foolish, drained of adrenaline, and like I’ve over-reacted to something that in some skewed model of reality was meant to be funny. But this is the headsickness thread:
So, dude, whoever you were, I hope that the shitty job you are employed in is something you are doing part-time to get you through college, where you are studying something useful, and someday soon you will contribute something of worth to the society you live in, because today your contribution was less than zero, and for the sake of that you made me distressed, and angry, and you ruined my day. |
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