First of all, I am not one to throw the term ‘feminazi’ around like a frisbee. I have never used it before nor do I intend to. I want equality for both genders and I don’t think the feminist movement is a bad one, although of course like so many movements you get a few bad eggs. One of these eggs hit me in the face last night. It caught me off guard that I really wanted to post about it.
I was sitting in a bar after work. I was with a colleague and she had to leave, I stayed and finished my drink whilst tapping words into my iPhone. It is a bar that generously gives me discount for working in a business nearby. I was sitting at a table when a young couple sat down next to me. It didn’t take long before we got chatting.
The girl leaned over to me a few minutes into them being there. She asked if I had been stood up by someone. Fair enough, I could well have been. Thankfully, this hasn’t happened to me before. I have had girls tell me they didn’t want a date with me, absolutely. But being stood up is something I haven’t had to endure and I don’t know how happy I would have been to admit it if I was indeed left waiting for a date that didn’t turn up. I told her I hadn’t been stood up. I could see she wasn’t entirely convinced, I asked why she assumed I had been.
She responded with, ‘Why did you mention being stood up? Are you ashamed because it affects your masculinity?!
Very confused, I could only respond with ‘What?!’.
I do have to say at this point that I could tell from her eyes that she was very drunk. The guy she was with put his head in his hands in embarrassment, he seemed a lot more sober. Despite her being drunk, she still wrongly assumed I was a male that was out on a date that didn’t want to meet me and that I was precious about my masculinity when confronted on the rejection I experienced. The trouble with this is, I just came here for a cheap beer after work. Judging someone after sitting next to them for five minutes is a pretty bad move. Not just judging internally, but to turn to that person and tell them who they are is not very nice, especially when the radar is so off track.
Hey, she was drunk. I am not proud of who I am when drunk, and I thank anyone who has dealt with my drunken ramblings when I am in such a state. Being the sober one in the situation only reminds me that I have probably been as stupid when drunk and that I have a new found respect for bar security that have to take trash talk on a nightly basis. Speaking to the guy she was with after she went outside on the phone to a friend, I found out they were on a Tinder date. I don’t know if their date was a successful one, only they can answer that. I personally would have ran a mile after her accusation. She did come back and the next thing I know is that she still involved me in their conversation, and that she opened up about losing religion. I could only assume that she caught the title of my blog whilst I was on my phone as it was strange that she opened up to me, withing about ten minutes of knowing me, on a topic I am so interested in. The topic change was out of the blue. She suddenly got tearful and told me and her date- I did not know who was on a date with who at this point- that she was losing religion and that she doesn’t know if this was a bad thing. It was something that she had all her life and that she was suddenly relearning everything.
It was actually at this point that the conversation got interesting and that I was more willing to chat to this seemingly judgmental person. Her dutch courage turned to vulnerability and both Tinder guy and myself tried to encourage her that there is a lot of beauty in leaving religion. It has, in our case at least, made this life one we really want to cherish. It doesn’t mean the final credits will definitely roll as we say our last breath, there could be some kind of afterlife, whether it be a God or an advanced alien setup. We could be in the matrix. The multiverse may well contain the most awesome and infinitely wonderful opportunities once our atoms disperse and head to the stars that we are built from. To be saddened by an absence of religion does take a dose of pessimism, enhanced by alcohol of course.
So yes, I had an interesting chat with an ‘agnostic feminazi’. I hope there aren’t too many of them around, thankfully it doesn’t seem that way. It also doesn’t really alter my opinion on feminists or agnostics, if one person could change such opinions we would have some awful opinions on pretty much everyone.
I finished my beer, thought about the conversation and was grateful that interesting conversations can sometimes pop out of nowhere, even if I am seen as a overly masculine, emotional date reject in the process. Cheers!
Featured Image by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
One Chance to See the World 