Where did my voice go?

The Unbearable Confidence of Men in the Pub.

• Women.
• Equality.
• Barbie.
• Vegans.
• 9/11 Conspiracy theories.
• Climate Change.
• The Dark Web.

Believe it or not all of these topics were covered by a man I do not know and had never met before last Friday night in my local pub in the space of about 45 minutes.

Friday had been one of those relaxing school holiday days, I’d slept in, watched some tv and spent the afternoon reading – it was safe to say I was pretty relaxed, I even said as much to my husband as we walked to our local pub. We were meeting our friends there to catch up after our respective holidays but when we arrived they’d already been joined by a man and a woman, similar age to us all mid/late 30s, white, middle class. It turns out that they were our friends’ old neighbours and they’d sat down a few minutes before we arrived. Not knowing them ourselves we all said polite hellos and we joined them. My husband and I started talking to one of our friends and the other remained in conversation with the other couple; it was when I heard the phrase ‘Yeah, it looked alright from the outside but then we went in and it was all vegan. Pfft. What a load of shit. So, we walked out.’ That my ‘idiot –alert’ buzzer started sounding internally. We then had to overhear a 5-minute rant about vegans being a waste of space, pathetic and a few other choice descriptions whilst I drank a glass of rose as quick as humanly possible and looked for an ejector seat.

Next, this man (not our friend, who looked painfully uncomfortable throughout a lot of this exchange) began to talk about videos he had been watching that day on the dark web. ‘You can find it all on there you know. All these original TV interviews and coverage of world events that haven’t been doctored and cut and edited by the BBC and the government. Everything they show us on TV is fake you know.’ By this point my relaxing day was starting to slip from my grasp as he ploughed on to talk about 9/11 conspiracy theories and how it was all a set up by the American government.

At one point I must have learned to block him out before my ears pricked up at the mention of ‘Barbie’, we had seen it the night before and both loved it. ‘She (his girlfriend) wants to go and see that ‘Barbie’ movie but it’s just an anti-men fest apparently, lefty nonsense.’ At this point I could be quiet no more, ‘It isn’t anti-men,’ I said, praying for more wine and the same level of confidence as this man, ‘It’s anti-patriarchy. It actually raises some excellent points about how patriarchy damages men too. If anything, it’s about equality. You should go and see it. Don’t just believe what Piers Morgan tells you.’

At that point the conversation moved on. My husband doesn’t like conflict; it makes him anxious so I do my best to stay out of difficult conversations when he’s with me but I had begun to seriously bristle at this point. He moved on to climate change – the less said about his opinions on this the better but I’m sure you can imagine his ‘anti-woke’ stand point. Then he delivered the clanger; the moment where I texted my husband (who was sitting next to me – don’t judge, you’ve all done it!) and said ‘I cannot sit here anymore. We need to move when our friends leave.’ His girlfriend said ‘Are we having one more drink?’ to which he replied ‘Yep. Off you go, you can’t expect equal rights and then not go to the bar yourself.’

….

Reader, with my wine glass half-way to my mouth, I GUFFAWED and my eyes rolled so far back I was worried they’d never return to normal. He looked at me, my friends looked at me. No-one said anything. Nothing more was said on the subject and not long after, they left. I was physically shaking with suppressed anger. I’m not a person who gets into conflict but in that moment I wanted to be in conflict with him, I wanted to challenge him, I wanted to call him out, I wanted to tell his girlfriend to run far, far away. Instead, I sat and seethed and tried not to let him ruin my evening.

Later that night I was disappointed with myself. As someone who is a fierce feminist and proud to be ‘woke’ when, let’s be honest, all woke means is caring about others, I wish I had said something to him but I didn’t. I wasn’t afraid of him but my voice, in comparison to his, felt small and squeaky and unsure. And all my knowledge, all the facts and research I have in my head that I could have used ceased to exist because in that moment, faced with someone who had literally no qualms about peddling his anti-feminism, anti-woke opinions to people he’d never met before I didn’t know where to start and I lost my voice.