I am hyper attuned to misogyny of late, like a vapor in the air that I can sense a single, poisonous molecule of. First, it tickles my nose, and I scrunch it up in disgust, and then I find that I am holding my breath until my temples begin to throb. It’s as though I am carrying around a specially tuned Geiger Counter in my clenched fist, but instead of picking up ionized radiation in the air, the little needle begins to lift and shake at the tiniest display of male entitlement.
Even now, as I write this in my favorite coffee shop— in the room detached from the rest of the store, the one that is often the quietest place to tap my thoughts onto the page— I am in the presence of two men who are shouting at one another across the room. Not aggressively, mind you. They are talking about how amazing Havasu Falls was back in the day, when only the hippies knew about it, and also the dangers of driving on ice in a rear wheel drive pickup with an empty bed, and how they’d love to live in a wild place like this one if there weren’t so many tourists— normal things that people chat about over coffee, I suppose— but they are on opposite sides of the room, speaking in voices so loud that I almost say something, but I don’t. One of the men is with his little boy, a toddler with golden curls who is bent over a bright yellow excavator, who just said (at a reasonable volume), Daddy, I don’t want you to talk anymore, and his father said, Well, you could listen!” And both men laughed loudly as though he had said something clever, great big guffaws knocking on hollow walls, and my Geigor Counter trembled.
What was it, exactly? Was it the volume alone? The dismissal of the boy’s request, the absurd suggestion that he listen to an adult conversation that had nothing to do with him? Was it the fact that when I walked into the otherwise unoccupied room, they did not alter their tone a bit? Did they not notice me? Of course they did. I remember it very clearly. The father noticed. He took note of my tank top and ripped jeans, his gaze dragging down my bare arms for just a flicker of a second too long as I walked past him.
I think about befriending a person in a coffee shop, across the room, and how nice it is to connect with strangers. I think about how, if someone else walked in and I was in that long-distance chatty situation, I would have nodded at them or at least made eye contact. It’s possible that I would have picked up my mug and plate and moved to a table closer to my new friend, and I would have lowered my voice if they were still speaking too loudly, as a way of saying, No, like this, see? Now we need to be quieter, without directly asking them to lower their voice, lest I make them uncomfortable.
Last week, my best friend and I went to a concert in Seattle, which is very unlike me, because it started at eight o’clock IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, and was also in a city with a bunch of cars, a city that took me four hours and twelve minutes to get to through an impressive rain storm on top of a mountain pass. It turned out to be a perfect day, and the concert was a transcendent experience, as all good concerts are. The musician, John Butler, did not make the Geiger Counter go off at all. Not even one little tremble. He was wise and warm and funny and in addition to doling out three hours of vocal and acoustic magic, he also had plenty of sharp words for the oligarchs and sycophants in charge of the world right now. At one point he said (and I’m doing my best to remember here): We can’t play their games. They are very good at war, at hate, at division and chaos. We cannot take up their weapons and try to defeat them on their terms. They don’t understand love and generosity and community. They don’t understand this. They want us to pick sides as if we’re living on a cube or a prism, but we’re living on a SPHERE. It’s all the same side! He rolled his hands into the shape of a ball. We all whooped and clapped and pumped our loving fists in the air.
And then he played this twelve-minute song called Ocean on his eleven-string guitar, and he was a miracle, and my nose did not scrunch up, it ting-ting-ed like it does when the tear ducts get strummed like his singing guitar, and then my eyes welled up and it was all really something. (Just click the link and listen to it already. Of course you have twelve minutes to spare. What else are you going to do, read another essay? Fold that load of laundry that’s been sitting in the dryer since last weekend? Bosh.)
Right when that song was really building steam, this guy came and stood next to me. Well, he squatted at first. I was sitting in the front row of the balcony, next to the aisle. It was a great seat, I must say, I felt like I was flying right above the scene, and there were no tall heads in front of me to crane my neck around. The man had been a few rows back, and he was that guy who yells really loudly between all the sets just to be heard in the silence (again, with the volume). And now he was leaning over the rail, blissed out and swaying, and I thought, Ok, have your moment, man. This is why we’re here. All good. I even got hazy and porous as you do in these moments, like his skin was mine and everyone else’s too, and I thought about how God was listening to this song through all of our ears, hearing and seeing it with those differences and samenesses, and how she was also feeling the strings under her fingers, and the vibration in her many chests, conjuring the music and also receiving it, all of her noses prickling with tears, and then we were all standing, because we HAD TO, and we were dancing, and then this guy, this guy was all up in my business. He was trying to dance with me, which, if you’re a woman, is one of those moments where you have to step carefully. I didn’t want to dance with this man, but I didn’t want to harsh his mellow either, you know? He was entitled to his joy, after all. But his arms kept flailing out, and he was so close he kept hitting me with his right arm. He was unnecessarily close. I turned slightly, so my body was angled toward my friend, away from him, and I kept dancing, but then he got even more pay-attention-to-me over there, so I just closed my eyes like I was taking in the music, even though I didn’t want to take my eyes off John in all his glorious wonder.
At one point, after he hit me again and I backed up and gave him the side-eye, he yelled over the music, Are you ok? Is this ok? and my Geiger Counter was basically cracking at that point, and you know what I said? I shouted, Yeah, it’s all good! Not with a smile or anything, not in a way where my face could be read as flirtatious or warm, because that was going to be a disaster, but in a way that made him feel better about being an ass.
This is the part where I am also complicit in the roles we play. The part that really makes me scrunch up my nose again. Why didn’t I tell him to back right off? Why didn’t I say, No, actually, you keep hitting me with your unwelcome noodle arms and you’re in my space and I don’t want to dance with you, man.
Well, maybe we all know why I didn’t say that. It’s same reason why, when I was a freshly minted marine biologist at twenty-two, I used to play along with this game that the boys who worked on the boats used to play, a game called “Make Her Stutter,” where they’d pull out all their raunchiest porn magazines and parade the images in front of me while making obscene gestures, just to see if I could finish my monologue without skipping a beat.
I would sit in the wheelhouse of that polished catamaran in Boston Harbor with the microphone in front of me— a faceless voice on the intercom talking to the passengers about safety and coastal ecology— and you know what?
I never stuttered.
They would always check with me to see if it was okay beforehand— that was the most ridiculous part. They acted like my comfort mattered to them, like this was a silly, consensual game. And sure, I could have objected, just like I could have objected to Noodle Arms. I could have told them to stop. But I was rewarded for going along, and even more so when I pretended that I thought it was hilarious, just like they did. I was just one of the guys, just guffawing along with them— such a good sport. They made me swans and sharks out of the aluminum foil in the galley and would present them to me like I was a goddess deserving of the shiniest gifts. They high fived me when I came aboard, letting me know that I was their favorite, and sometimes they invited me out to the pub after work. Sometimes one of them would kiss me sloppily on the sidewalk before I told them I needed to call it a night and made haste to get out of there.
But lately, lately I just can’t do it anymore. I don’t always say what I want to when I want to— I often stutter— but I am saying it. Sometimes in the moment, messily and imperfectly, and sometimes afterwards, with a bit more clarity.
Still, I often wake up at three in the morning when The Committee feels the need to go over whatever the latest incident was— all the things I did and did not say, and how I could have done better, and what conversations might need to happen tomorrow in the aftermath, and what he might say or do if I say that versus that— and I very much doubt that the men wake up thinking about these things. The Men with Loud Voices won’t wonder if they took up too much auditory real estate. Noodle Arms surely passed out after the concert like a sweaty star fish with nary a thought in his brain. The Boat Boys probably got their dirty magazines back out at the end of their workdays and wanked themselves to sleep every night after playing their silly, harmless games.
But I can’t wake up the next morning now and just swallow the rage. I can’t stuff the Geiger Counter in my pocket while it vibrates its warnings. I find myself slamming it on the counter, letting people know that I’m not, actually a good sport about some things. That’s it, I guess. I no longer have any interest in being one of the guys. I am a mother and a sister and a daughter, surrounded by a mighty coven of women, non‑binary and queer kin, and men rooted in their healed, integrated masculinity, and there is nowhere on earth I would rather be.
Sometimes, when it all feels like too much, I shake my limbs like a gazelle who just narrowly dodged the claws of a hungry lion. I shake and shake. My body knows just what to do— I let her take over. I quiet my mind, and I let her release what needs releasing. Right now, I’m watching an aspen quake by the river, and I know she gets it. I’m watching a duck wildly flap her wings, sending water spraying, and I know she does too.
I’m going to keep doing it until I my lungs open again.
I’m going to keep doing it until I don’t stutter.
Thanks to everyone who clicks on that little heart to let me know you’re here. Especially to all of you who pop into the chat to share a little of your life with me. I genuinely love you people. You are my coven.
Oh, Kendall! This is EXACTLY how I feel lately. Like a layer or two of skin has been rubbed off by their nonsense and I can no longer tolerate the BS entitlement. The space-taking, the objectifying, the easy assumptions. Shaking is how prey animals dispel the fright hormones after an encounter with a predator. It’s a powerful insight to acknowledge I’ve felt like prey my whole life. It messes with you. And it’s so healing to say, NO MORE. (I LOL’d at 8:00 being the middle of the night! 😂 So true.) I read your words and wrote these while listening to “Ocean.” It’s a marvel. 💙
Kendall, something in me went full Geiger Counter at that concert scene.
Surface Europe actually delivered one thing: political correctness changed the behavior. Men here learned to swallow the noodle-arm reach, to retire the “Make Her Stutter” games at least where someone could see them. We move through coffee shops and concerts with less of this particular nonsense now.
And yet — the belief roots right where it always rooted. A man who knows to hide it still knows. We just lost our Geiger Counter data.
What stopped me — stopped me cold — was your sentence where you handed Noodle Arms his joy back. He was entitled to his joy. Your whole body registered what was happening. And still your mouth opened and delivered “yeah, it’s all good.”
A survival script so deeply grooved we run it in the middle of something sacred. Even while John Butler unspools twelve minutes of oceanic grace two feet away.
Here’s what decades outside every dominant group actually taught me — as someone who always landed on the edge of whatever room I walked into: when you belong nowhere, the compliance math shifts. Nobody expects you to play along, so you gain something odd: the freedom to enforce your own edges. I pushed back. Hard sometimes, into very uncomfortable territory for the men involved. And yes, I gathered flack for making people uncomfortable — as if my discomfort registered on a different scale entirely.
The difference lives here: I arrived at those encounters with nothing to protect. You did. The swans folded from galley foil, the pub invitations, the high fives — real things. Belonging runs deep in humans. And the game understood exactly what it dangled when it offered membership as the prize for swallowing the whole thing.
So when you say you’ll keep shaking until the stutter clears — I hear something more tangled than a vow. I hear you running the real arithmetic: what does piss off actually cost now, in the moment? And deciding — slowly, messily — the silence runs higher.
The shift already moved. It moves every time you write the thing you almost said.