Pub banter, sexist movies and the joys of being a dad
Pub banter, movie misogyny, and dad joy all in one edition.
I had half an hour to kill yesterday before a post-work event started, so I popped to a favourite quiet bar for a cheeky pint before it started. It's a real ale specialist pub so it's usually full of middle-aged men asking to sample half a dozen types of bitters with names like Wenlock's Shotgun or Half A Bob Mild.
I'd come in to read a magazine in peace and settled down to a corner table with my beer. Opposite me was another guy about my age doing almost exactly the same thing, a book nestled on the table as he got up for another pint.
To my right was a middle-aged couple finishing their drinks. They stood up and the woman announced she needed the bathroom. The man looked over at the bar to read the code number needed to access the toilets. "6-8-7-1" he read back to her. "68, the year I was born" she mused back. "And then 7, the number of men you've slept with!", the man leered back at her. They were standing so close to my table that he had to have said it for me to hear, especially the volume he boomed it at. She laughed it off and they made their way to the exit.
I mean... as pub banter goes, it was a fairly innocuous comment, all things considered. But what made me uncomfortable was the idea that he'd deliberately said it for me to hear, either to embarrass the woman or just to get a reaction from me (I ignored them both). Why do men do this? I guess there's a particular flavour of humour that's based around saying something taboo or embarrassing in a crowded space where you have the gift of anonymity (or you're about to leave anyway), but the added misogyny in this case made me wonder what the woman really thought of her partner's banter.
Now I Am Become Bored
We watched Oppenheimer a few nights ago in all its three-hour glory. After the movie finished, Maddy and I were talking about what we made of it. Her biggest takeaway was the rubbish portrayal of women in the film: there are barely any female characters of consequence and the ones that do make it into scenes tend to be foils for Oppenheimer to demonstrate his brilliance, or just there for some casual titillation during the sex scenes.
I tried to argue that this was deliberate and made the film's message more powerful: eg. three hours of white men arguing about the best way to kill thousands of people and waging endless war on one another raises obvious questions about how things could've turned out if more women were in positions of leadership during the period around World War II.
Maddy wasn't having any of this, though, and insisted the film wouldn't pass the Bechdel test. I suddenly found myself entrenched in my position, arguing that the movie was portraying historical events that were on the record: if they invented a fictional woman scientist to oppose Oppenheimer's A-bomb plans then the film would no longer be a biopic or historically accurate.
I was a bit embarrassed to hear myself spouting the kind of boorish talking points that come up whenever the question of diversity in casting is raised. When Amazon released their Rings of Power TV show they were heavily criticised for casting Black people as elves, dwarves and hobbits, with Tolkien purists trying to find textual "evidence" to demonstrate the impossibility of such racially-motivated casting. I'm one of the biggest Tolkien fans you'll meet but I couldn't manage to get worked up about a brown-skinned hobbit in a fictional universe involving dragons, wizards and goblins. Why wasn't I applying the same flexibility to Oppenheimer?
A bit like the man in the pub, sometimes we just blurt something out because it's easy, satisfying and cheap. My partner was sharing her discomfort with a movie that made it appear that no woman had any bearing on the events of the Manhattan Project (besides a quick roll in the hay with J Robert Oppenheimer between detonations), and I dismissed it with the grace and debating skills of a GB News host.
Mini-feels this week
The quiet joy of being a dad
When I got home from the event last night it was midnight and the family were all asleep. I reached my bedroom to see the door open and my spot in the bed already taken by our nearly-five-year-old son, who's been off school sick all week. He's been climbing into bed with us in the early hours each night recently in between bouts of coughing.
I didn't have the heart to move him (and didn't fancy squeezing in alongside him and Maddy) so I slept in his bedroom instead. As I fell asleep I thought about him: his energy, his humour, his sheer unpredictable nature and the things he creates with his own imagination. I smiled to myself as I lay in a child's bed decorated with rockets and planets, my feet sticking out of the end of the bed, and felt a sheer joy at being a father, at having brought this life and energy into the world that I can't take credit for, but can definitely take pleasure and gratitude in sharing it. I fell asleep happy.