Nice Tits (from MRR #319)

yep, that's a Barbara Kruger.


Kristin and I have ventured to the Black Castle in Inglewood for an epic dose of metal. None of the band names are familiar, but with the wildfires, community college, and missing everybody in the bay, I’m in a dark mood, a metal mood. It’s $15, (yikes!) but the interior is perfectly familiar, a barewalled converted old warehouse space with a slapped together stage and exposed rafters. I feel blissfully at home.

The metal is technical, flashy, and the hair is whipping at a phenomenal speed. It’s not really what I was looking for, not the darkness I wanted, but it’ll do.

The first person to speak to me of the night, that is not Kristin, is a young heavy set dude, with long hessian locks, in a crisply black shirt with a pretty unremarkable and dumb band name on in like Nightskull or Zombie Death, or something like it. But I’m still pleased to maybe make a friend, being new in town can be rough.

Instead of leaning in to say hi, or something equally friendly and expected. He looks me full in the eyes and jockishly says “nice tits,” with a menacing kind of friendliness in his air. Everything in his manner says ‘If your cool you’ll say thank you and wink, if you get upset, you are an uptight bitch.’ It’s an approach that risks nothing and dares you to get upset. One I am too familiar with.

I want to punch him, or at least get a good solid slap across his face. To keep from doing so I lash back with the first snide and cutting enough response I can think of.

In tight but even tones I say, “you too” and mock wink. I haul myself to the other side of the stage before he can respond.

It feels good to have something cold and bitchy but funny to say at just the right moment, but it feels hollow too. I’m reduced to making a joke about his size to defend my self and my sex.

My small victorious high wears off entirely by the time we are leaving. I am wondering if I handled things as well as I could have, when a dude from one of the bands standing outside hollers at us wanting to know if we wanna be their groupies. As we keep walking down the street there is the faint sound of the word “bitches” on the breeze. I sigh.

Sometimes it’s so hard to know what is worth expending energy on, and what is best left unanswered; what fights are worth fighting. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and struggling with more lately.

I remember standing around Nick and Rhi’s kitchen this summer in Brighton after our show, holding a beer in each hand while heather sat on the countertop. We took turns complaining about young dudes saying and singing fucked up shit on tour.

“Ugh, I mean they are teenage dudes I keep expecting them to know better, but they don’t. “

“And they were so stereotypical too. ‘this song is about my ex-girlfriend’ then every other word in the chorus is bitch. We walked out, and were gonna tear them a new one, but it just didn’t seem worth it.”

Nick didn’t agree. He thought it was important to challenge people everytime, call them out. “it’s important” he said with a warm smile, and he was right.

I know it’s important, I do, but most of the time I am just too tired to really deal, too overwhelmed. I roll my eyes, mouth “fuck you,” but ultimately let the offending incidents go by unchecked. I make excuses for people, I invoke cultural relativity and tell myself that I didn’t understand the situation right, that it’s different here in London, or Arkansas, or San Diego, that I can’t really know or judge their cultural climate or intent. I tell myself these things so I don’t have to fight every inch of everyday. So I don’t have to cause conflict, so I don’t have to rock the boat, so I can I just get on living life.

But isn’t that what punk and radical politics is all about? Rocking the boat, challenging all the unbelievable bullshit we see and experience in the world, even in our peers, maybe particularly among our peers.

While that is true, letting things go can be necessary sometimes too. I only have finite energy to battle the forces of thousands of years of gender based bullshit, and it’s not my responsibility to take every sexist asshole I meet and read him the riot act and instruct him how to not be an asshole.

There has to be a balance, a compromise between the two.

I’ve decided to try something new. No more pretending not to hear shit, no more declaring war sporadically. I want to be the kind of person that reasons with people, that lets them know when they say and do fucked up shit, and why I think it’s fucked up.

I don’t have all the energy in the world, but I can do this. I can talk to people, I can try to stay calm, I can reason it out. I can try.

So, to the random metal head in Inglewood: Sorry about the tits thing, you had something coming to you, but making fun of your size was not it. That said, I see you again and you talk that same shit to me you are in for a real long lecture about how saying shit like that makes you an asshole, and why you shouldn’t be one. But be careful, I’m new at this, you make me too mad, I still might just knock you out.

No new PO Box yet, sorry. Save up all those letters and send ‘em at once, drown me in paper.

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