A restaurant in Maine has been blowing marijuana smoke in lobsters’ faces, in an effort to minimize their pain when they get boiled alive. Local officials have stepped in to put a stop to the practice, and though I have no evidence of this, it seems to me this latest outbreak of schoolmarmism has “old white guys” written all over it.
Americans who follow the news may be aware of just how many crevices the tentacles of old white guys reach into, and how many arteries of freedom the old white guys are apt to clog.
There’s a psychological phenomenon at work here. I’m on the cusp of being an old white guy myself, but a very long time ago, I was a young white guy. So, I was riddled with white privilege. Back then, white privilege meant your family rode around in a Ford Country Squire, and your dad owned a CB radio, and when you became aware that there was a thing in the world called a Fender Stratocaster, your parents could buy one for you.
It also meant that you lived in a neighborhood where if a black person showed up, they were either a maid, or a mailman, or a suspicious character.
I can clearly recall seeing a black teenager walking down the street, and thinking, that’s weird. What’s he doing here?
And when I look back on it, I can also recall thinking that anyone who wasn’t white was like an alien. Sometimes they were affable, likable aliens, like the few non-white people who went to my private school. Those people were, generally, way fucking smart, charming, and all the rest of it. But they were still aliens.
I remember in high school, when I found out a friend I had been close with in middle school was dating an African-American girl who had also been in my middle school class. I hadn’t seen either of these kids in a few years, but I heard they were a couple when my mom and his mom told me about it. The reason they told me was they wanted me to stop it.
The idea, apparently, was that I would go and tell my friend that he should stop seeing this girl. And not because she wasn’t a lovely girl. Nobody was suggesting THAT. The two moms were asking me to do this for high-minded reasons. It isn’t fair to the children, they said. By this they meant the hypothetical children who would arrive, if this dating led to anything serious and lasting, such as love.
It’s just not fair to put kids through that, they said, and their voices were sad and forlorn, as they imagined how terrible a fate it would be for those kids to be born into a world where, unfortunately, some people weren’t high-minded enough to see those children without prejudice.
So, yes, I lived in a pretty insular white guy world. But in that world, I was very much an outsider. I read books, listened to music that wasn’t cool, didn’t like or understand sports (though I tried to, desperately, for a while), and was mostly mocked and bullied by the other white guys, when I wasn’t mocking and bullying the guys who were even lower than I was on the food chain.
Girls (later, women) were entirely baffling to me. Following a series of spectacularly wrongheaded choices and embarrassing behavior, as well as long periods of loneliness, I was lucky enough to meet a girl whom I was right for, and now we’re both growing old together. And somewhere in there, partly because of all the one-on-one music teaching I was doing, I got to be a good listener. Young women who were my students regularly gave me thorough and dispiriting updates on their personal lives, and I tried to help them with smallish suggestions about figuring out what they should and shouldn’t put up with from a boyfriend , and things like that. I always told them that whatever sounded like wisdom coming from me was always the result of me having made countless stupid mistakes in my own life. I always told them it seemed absurd to me that people were looking to me for advice about ANYTHING that wasn’t music-related. They would chuckle, sometimes ruefully, and continue telling me about the shitty day, or week, they’d had.
In retrospect, I think a lot of these young women were just happy to talk to a man who wasn’t trying to sleep with them, and who actually seemed to care about their feelings, and take them seriously as adults, and equals. And my lessons were cheaper than therapy.
In my personal and professional life, over a long period of time, I’ve heard many many women tell me about sexual assault they’ve experienced. When I first heard a story like this, it was told to me in confidence and I guarded it zealously, as if it were a rare and colorful bird on the verge of extinction.
Later, I heard another similar story, and another, until I’ve literally lost track of how many women’s stories I heard in confidence. The Me Too era, shocking as its revelations are for most white guys, is not entirely surprising for me. Women friends of mine have been preparing me for it for years.
The other day, I was eating breakfast in a diner and talking with my son about the Kavanaugh confirmation process. I was saying to my son that I didn’t think the GOP was going to treat Dr. Ford respectfully enough for my tastes. As usual, my son will tell you, I was talking too loudly. This is partly from rock-related deafness, and partly from my attitude that one of the few things I like about America is that I can say out loud whatever the fuck I want to say. That’s a freedom worth getting patriotic about, it seems to me.
But an old white guy sitting next to me at the counter said he couldn’t help but overhear our conversation. This was my cue to go into polite listening mode, so the uocoming exchange wouldn’t be remembered by this old white guy as an Archie Bunker vs. Meathead type of scene.
He handed me a Washington Times article, saying, you might want to read this. The Washington Post didn’t report this story, he said. I babbled something civil about always being happy to hear both sides of something, and I started to read the article.
I started reading it with the idea that it would be a news story, reporting facts. It was that, but it was also smarmy innuendo. While I read, the old white guy quoted Shakespeare, suggesting that Dr. Ford (he didn’t refer to her that way) “doth protest too much.”
The story revealed that Dr. Ford, before she earned her advanced degree, was a bartender or waitress (I’ve forgotten) at some place at some beach where young people went to drink and get laid. In essence, she worked and lived in an environment of alcohol and sex. The article talked a lot about how much sex young people were having in that town, but didn’t offer much evidence that Christine was some sort of wanton hussy. You were supposed to figure that out on your own. It did point out that two guys who both wanted to have sex with Christine had “tussled” over her. That was about the most damning direct allegation in the story that the Washington Post, biased as it undoubtedly was and is, had declined to run.
I talked to my son about this article when we drove home. I asked him to imagine that Christine had literally been a prostitute who at 18 had slept with literally every man within 20 miles of the bar where she served drinks. If that were true, I asked, would that make it ok for two drunk white guys to try to rape her three years earlier, when she was 15 years old? (My son is 14, by the way.)
Well, it was a leading question, and my son isn’t an idiot.
I found myself thinking about this old white guy in the week or so since I read that article.
That old white guy didn’t need much convincing to doubt Dr. Ford’s story, or if you prefer, Christine’s story, or that blonde’s story, or however you care to characterize it. In his mind, it was like settled science. Another hussy, or slut, or whatever, sleeping around and then trying to burn some innocent white guy whose only crime was working hard and trying to be the best person he could be.
Perhaps it is something like that. I can’t see into people’s minds, and I don’t have a crystal ball, so I don’t pretend to know what happened and what didn’t happen.
But this is my best guess about the real difference between me and that other old white guy I was sitting next to.
I’m not such a great person. I’m pretty selfish, most of the time, and I can’t pretend that I’ve always been sensitive to the feelings and needs of women I’ve been close to. I haven’t.
But women know they can tell me personal stuff, even horribly painful personal stuff that changed their lives forever, and the evidence for that statement is that many many women have told me these ugly things. I’m no hero. I’ve never had the balls to intervene in any situation where a woman was being mistreated, and while I like to believe I would today, who knows?
But I am a good listener.
And I suspect that many old white guys like the one who told me about the story the Post wouldn’t run haven’t heard those stories that women tell you to your face, because women who know those guys know damn well that they’re not the guys to talk to.
I think that if women have never talked to you about these things, it’s worth asking the question, why haven’t they?
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