“Hey,
hey girl. Sit down. I’m givin’ you my seat.”
This
from a skinny man on the train who was, apparently, determined to get my
attention. I was wearing my biggest shades and my headphones and toting my
usual twenty-pound Show Bag*, just like any other day on the red line. Let the
record show that I was also looking pretty good, although it might have just
been the new dress and unexpectedly good hair day going to my head.
For
whatever reason – possibly because I was only four stops from my destination,
possibly because I didn’t feel like giving this guy an excuse to keep talking
to me – I just didn’t feel like sitting. So I smiled, shook my head, and went
back to looking away and out the window.
It
would seem that, for some people, this is a huge insult.
Or
so you would think, as I spent the rest of my train ride being loudly and insistently
asked to take my headphones out, whether I was ‘looking for a man’, whether I
was a ‘good and decent woman’ who knew how to treat one, and, finally, loudest
of all, whether I was ‘one of those dykes.’