Encounters part 2: Bananas, bibles and the metro

I have mentioned before that, being on my own abroad, I have tended to attract members of society which include the interesting, the lonely and the uninhibitedly creepy. A fact which may give you a clue as to the theme of this blog post. Between anecdotes, this post is a bit more serious than the ones preceding it because it addresses an underlying social issue: misogyny. A problem whose effects can range from the annoying to the flat-out threatening.

My experiences themselves can be separated into two categories: the ones which I can retell over drinks because they are ridiculous enough to laugh about (even just out of shock) in retrospect, and the ones which genuinely scared or disturbed me. The latter don’t make for such fun reading material. However, many women I know have had experiences on such a level, in which they have been made to feel imminently threatened or concerned. That in itself deserves to be acknowledged.

But, moving on to one of the anecdotes I like to bring out time and again, I will now recount to my fair audience (that’s you) an event I call:

The Banana Man Story

The setting is Pueblo Libre, Lima, in the mid-afternoon. I was walking to the local supermarket, about five minutes away at this point, when a man at least two decades older than myself walked past me in the opposite direction. Except, he didn’t carry on walking past me, in the direction he was headed – he turned on his heel and started to keep pace with me.

I pretended not to notice and carried on walking with my imaginary blinkers on. And then he started to talk. Initially, he tried to introduce himself - I politely said hello and carried on walking. He carried on talking. I tried the ‘no hablo mucho castellano’ card, but he was not deterred. After giving me a summary of his life story (whilst I continued to walk in the direction of the supermarket, now about thirty seconds away), he asked me if I wanted to get a coffee. I said no, but gracias. Then he asked if I wanted to get dinner. At this point, my trail of thought went in two directions: 1) when someone declines coffee, normally that is time to accept defeat, not up the stakes to dinner. 2) that as much as I wanted to make a quick escape, I had been taught that, if followed, not to go straight home. Again, I politely declined and again, he did not take the hint. The hint being, in this case, a direct ‘thank you, but no’.

Realising that I was not going to get rid of this guy easily, into the supermarket I went, to buy some time – at least there, there was CCTV, guards, and bright lighting. As he followed me round the aisles, still embarking on his monologue, I was quietly panicking. To seem occupied, I grabbed whatever was to hand: bananas, cashews, instant noodles. This blind panic-shopping was to be my saving grace later. When I finally couldn’t carry any more things, we (my new follower and I) went up to the counter. When the cashier picked up the bananas, she told me that I hadn’t weighed them, and she couldn’t put them through until they had been weighed and priced. At this point, my incredibly talkative shadow grabbed said bananas and said ‘Great! I’ll go weigh the bananas, then we can go for coffee’ and disappeared off to the fruit section. This was my chance. ‘I don’t know this man’ I said.

‘But he came in with you’

‘Yes, but he followed me off the street. What do I do?’

This poor checkout girl, who was probably hoping to get to the end of her shift without any drama, advised me to pay for what I had at the counter and run before he got back. And that’s exactly what I did. Scooping up my cashews and instant noodles, I sprinted for the exit – seeing, obliviously running in the opposite direction, the man carrying my weighed bananas.

I sprinted five hundred yards to the district’s only Starbucks and hid there for half an hour before venturing home. And that, ladies and gentleman, is the story of the Banana Man of Lima.

Parable on the train

My next tale of harassment and general bewilderment does not contain fruit (I’m sorry), but does include Simone de Beauvoir, a religious zealot and the kindness of strangers. So, let’s journey to the other side of the world, to the FGC train between Barcelona and Bellaterra. Travelling back from a Pilates class, I found a seat on the train, got settled in and immediately opened my book of the moment: Simone de Beauvoir’sThe Second Sex. A man decided to sit directly opposite me; at first, I didn’t take much notice, since the train was filling up fast. Then, he started to talk to me (there’s a pattern here). He asked me if the book I was reading was the Bible. I smiled and said no, it was The Second Sex, a book about misogyny and feminism. Ironic, in hindsight.

‘So, it’s not the Bible?’ He seemed confused.

‘No, not the Bible.’

‘Why aren’t you reading the Bible? You should read the Bible’. This went on for a little while, until I tried to ignore him and go back to reading. He didn’t respond very well to this. Leaning forward, and very close into my personal space, continued to interrogate me more loudly about why I wasn’t reading the Bible. I leaned back into my seat to get some distance, suddenly very uncomfortable with the proximity of this increasingly aggressive Bible fanatic with no sense of boundaries. Now the train was busy and we were starting to gain attention. He was still talking about the Bible. When he moved in further in, trapping me in my seat, that was when someone decided to step in. The two strangers who were sitting next to my interrogator and me suddenly sparked into action, making the points – quite correctly – that Spanish was clearly not my first language, I was young, and I could read what I wanted. He then turned on the woman sitting next to him, talking about the word of God and how we should all be reading it. But this lady (whoever you are, thank you) wasn’t taking that lying down.

At some point, the interaction became too quick for me to understand, but finally he got up and left the train (I don’t know if it was his stop or he had just lost the argument), still ranting. The lady and gentleman next to me made sure I was okay, and we all agreed that the guy was both bizarre and (to put it politely) unpleasant, before falling back into the comfortable silence of train anonymity.

One positive aspect of this story that I like to take is this: for every negative, aggressive or obnoxious person out there, there are at least two kind people willing to help you.

Metro misogyny – Another one

This tale also takes place on a train in Barcelona, although this was the L3 metro and we have fast-forwarded two years. Picture yourself alone on a crowded metro after work. You are tired, hungry and generally a bit antsy on your commute home, and all you want to do is get in, put on your pyjamas and pour a G+T. That was how you would find me most week nights. And then this happened:

I stepped onto an already-crowded metro at Diagonal, swiftly followed by a small wave of fellow commuters. As the doors closed, I was fully ready to follow standard protocol and avoid eye contact with everyone until we reached my destination. Then someone says ‘hola’. At first, I didn’t realise he was talking to me, because … well, why would you talk to a stranger on the metro? Then he said ‘hola’ again. So, I looked around, looked at him and returned the greeting.

‘Castellano? Inglés? Francés?’ he asks me. I said I spoke Spanish. Then, he asks me for my number. Not my name, not any details about myself, my number. I say no. He asks me if I have Facebook – I do, but again I said no. Whatsapp? No. ‘I’m not very social’ I say. But this guy does not give up.

‘Tienes novio? Do you have a boyfriend?’ I hate this question, and I knew it was coming. What it roughly translates as is ‘I don’t care that you have just said no. The fact that you, as an autonomous individual, have decided for yourself that you are not interested, means nothing to me. I will only respect that you are unavailable if you are the property of another man.’

A big part of me wanted to argue that exact point. In the past, I have. That whether I am in a relationship doesn’t matter in this instance, because I have already said no to you – that should be enough. And I have learnt that often it is equivalent to banging your head against a brick wall. So this time, because I was tired and just wanted to get home without drama (we can always dream), I said yes. But if I thought that would deter him, wow I was wrong. This lead onto one of the most galling conversations with a stranger I have had in recent memory.

‘No, you don’t have a boyfriend’ he laughs,

‘Yes, I do.’

Then he asked me a question I didn’t quite catch, so I simply said I didn’t understand. Hopefully that would be the end of the conversation. No such luck.

‘Va a casarte? Is he going to marry you?’ He points at his ring finger.

‘Oh.’ I look away, praying that I could just ignore him until the train crawled into my station (three minutes away at this point). And just when I thought that rudely personal question would be the end of it, he tops it with:

‘If he’s not going to marry you, no problem – you can still give me your number!’.

Umm … still no. In the two minutes it had taken to get from Passeig de Gracia to Plaça Catalunya, his argument had gone from ‘I don’t respect your decision not to give me your phone number, but I might respect that you have a boyfriend (read: owner)’ to ‘even your relationship doesn’t count if you are not married’. To follow his logic, he is entitled to a woman’s contact details and company, regardless of her choice or relationship, if she is not legally bound to another man. I was astounded. And I still said no.

‘But why not?’

So I said pretty much what I wanted to say at the beginning of this conversation: ‘Porque le dije que no.’ Because I told you no.

End of conversation? Apparently not. I had also clicked onto the fact that he was edging ever closer, I had been edging further away, and I was running out of space before having to climb over the person next to me. He asked me what stop I was getting off at. I lied and said it was the one further along than my actual stop. He said he had to get off at Catalunya but would walk to Liceu (no idea why, Liceu is the next station along and – coincidentally – my actual stop). Fortunately, this agonising, hackle-raising encounter ended about five seconds later when the metro pulled into Catalunya and he did indeed get off.

Two minutes later, I left my own metro station and jogged all the way back to my flat – there was no way I was going to risk running into him again. This had been at 6.30pm, on a busy train. If it had been later at night, and the metro had been quiet, I would have been scared and not just irritated. The gin I poured myself that day was larger than usual.

(Exhausted after a long day of smashing the patriarchy)

My Point

If there is one thing that links all of these stories, it is a flagrant lack of respect for women – for our decisions, for our personal space and for our right to say no. I can laugh about these tales now, but what is serious is these men’s assumption that they have the inalienable right to be listened to and the right to get what they want: a phone number, a coffee, sex. And these aren’t even the more threatening stories in my repertoire of sexist encounters. 

Attitudes of masculine entitlement and superiority are still rampant in societies across the world. This has to change, not just for our convenience, but for our safety, and the safety of anyone who does not fit into the patriarchal standards of gender and sexuality. The fight for equality, against misogyny and the patriarchy, is not over. ‘No’ should not be the beginning of a negotiation. A woman’s choices should not be valued less by individuals or by society, nor should our safety and security be less certain. We should not have to justify ourselves.

There shouldn't be drama in buying bananas.

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