Go Back Home To Your Village

Women are objectified.  Women put up with objectification all the time.  It’s a constant issue in so much of the world, when most women head out into the world, to mind their own business.  And I don’t want to equivocate.  But sometimes, particularly in this city that is comparatively safe for women to walk around in, it is foreign men who have to put up with a mild strain of this objectification. 

I can’t walk from my serviced apartment to dinner or over to my campus here, near Shanghai’s People’s Park, without someone asking me if I want to pay for sex.  Sometimes it is young men who approach you, sometimes its older grizzled guys.  Sometimes it is younger women who step right up, sometimes they are women my age.  Every single time it is drag.  Every single time it is tiring, and takes you off your center. Every single time I try to fire off something caustic back at the person, in well-practiced Mandarin. 

I left my apartment tonight and made it about twenty-five feet before I spied a young lady in her late twenties making a bee-line for me.  “Hello. Do you want a . . .“  I didn’t let her finish.  Turning to look her in the eye, I asked her in Mandarin:  “Why do you waste people’s time this way?  Go back home to your village.”  With that I walked away.  I suspected that this, in Shanghai of all places, would find a mark and it did.  In Chinese she said, “What?  You go home to your village!”  Then she added in English “Fuck you!”  I was tempted to say: “everyone needs a dream.” which I can say in Mandarin, but I reckoned I’d done enough.  “Fuck you” spoken in anger, is never a particularly nice thing to hear yelled at oneself. 

So now, later, dining by myself, writing, I know everyone would have been better off if I’d simply said: “no thank you.” And it doesn’t take a degree in feminist theory to know that my “objectification” if that’s what it was, was objectification with a lower case “O.”  I took the low road and objectified her right back, illustrating my power to insult her to her face, and reject her crass advance and cast her as a bad person, and me as good.  I flaunted my language power, my economic power, my male power.  I suppose all this is true.  And still, I really am tired of being approached this way.  I really am genuinely annoyed.  I think this feeling is human, and not misogynistic. I really don’t discriminate much by gender to whom I bark things like: “go back home to the countryside.”  I just want to be left alone.  Is polite endurance always the best path for women going from here to there in a city at night, as well as for men?  Cities drain from people, whomever they are.

Post script:

I returned ninety minutes later and she was sitting in a chair not far from our initial exchange.  I looked at her.  She looked at me.  We both decided to keep silent.  But it was clear we were both ready to say many more things.

Wednesday, 8/09/17