Many years ago, three friends and I took the ferry to Vancouver to help a friend move. We were all young women in our third year of university. It was a gorgeous day. We were happy to be together, and we were laughing and joking as the ferry left the dock.
Out of the blue, an older man came up to us and told us that we were being too noisy. Now, there are a dozen ways of politely telling a stranger that they’re being too noisy. (I myself have done it nicely — it can be done!)
This man, however, chose to inform us rudely that we were ruining his trip, and he did it with a pointed nastiness that we were unprepared for.
We were, of course, mortified. We hadn’t suspected that we were bothering anyone, and were abashed after being scolded like children.
Now, it’s likely that we were being too loud. We were excited and happy, and I’m sure we were being inconsiderate in our exuberance. But instead of treating of us like adults and asking us politely to quiet down, this man decided that we needed to be reprimanded and humiliated.
It wasn’t an aggressive encounter, but it was unmistakably a case of a man looking at the women beside him and deciding that they needed to be put back in their place.
I’ve been in far more extreme confrontations with strangers in public (a mood-killing habit of calling out sexism in bars will do that), but that encounter has stayed with me. For weeks, it brought a coil of embarrassment and anger to my stomach whenever I thought about it.
I’ve had people be ruder to me for less, and I got on with my day, but the disrespect and condescension with which that man treated my friends rankled — especially since I was with three of the kindest, most civil people I know.
I thought back to that encounter this week, as I was once again on the ferry to Vancouver. A man was talking on his cellphone and, though he was several tables away, I could clearly hear every word he was saying about his upcoming presentation. I’ve become inured to overhearing people’s too-loud phone conversations in public — it happens. That’s not to say it’s not inconsiderate, but ... meh. There are worse things.
As I was ruminating, I realized that even if I had found his inconsiderate behaviour annoying, I would never tell him he was being rude and demand that he hang up his phone. Nobody else seemed interested in doing that, either.
This man, who was white and middle-aged and evidently on a business trip, seemingly had the right to take up as much space, physical or auditory, as he needed. If that meant he had to make a call, well then, he had to make a call. And though he was definitely talking too loudly, nobody thought they needed (or wanted) to step in and discipline him.
This obviously isn’t to say that young women are angels and all middle-aged white businessmen are selfish jerks. Rather, it’s an observation that we tend to judge men’s and women’s behaviour differently.
Men are often assumed to have a right to take up public space, while women (especially young women) work within narrower confines. It’s an observable trend, for example, that men who use public transit take up more room by lounging or spreading out their belongings, while women modulate their bodies to stay within the seat boundaries and not physically impose upon strangers.
This extends to conversation, too: In group settings, female participants are perceived as dominating a conversation if their contributions exceed 30 per cent of said conversation. To put it another way, women are perceived as dominating a conversation if men’s contributions do not exceed 70 per cent of said conversation.
We’re so at home with the idea that a man has a right to public space that even when he’s being inconsiderate, we hesitate to correct him. We reserve that kind of policing for women who take up too much room, or who are unladylike, or who step out of line.
The next time I find myself frustrated by a teenage girl on her phone who I think is talking too much or too loudly, I’ll think about how I’d react if she were a man in a suit.
