Yet another "Here's what happened to me today," thread.
I was on my college campus in what can basically be called a lounge room where people come to sit, relax, do work, hang out, all that stuff. My friends and I were hanging around when I started arguing with a friend of mine about something very minor. Now, he wasn't the sexist I'm talking about. It got to the point where I said the word "pussy", the slang word for wimp, not the cat or organ. We immediately stop when I hear some guy yelling behind me. I'm half deaf, so I turned around to see him staring at me with a freaked out face and asked him what he said.
He tells again me, "Watch your language, there are women present."
I stop for a moment, as it took me a second to understand what in the hell he meant. He says that I'm offending people and then points to one of the girls in the room, who only looked up from her book when he started yelling. That's right. He singled this poor girl out (despite there were plenty of other girls in the room, one of which was my friend who was sitting right next to me) and said that I was offending her.
Confused, she only states awkwardly, "Um, I'm alright..." It's at this point where I respond to him with the first thing that pops into my mind, "Uh, that's kinda sexist." He looks at me like he's gonna get all up in my face and says, "Excuse me?!" in a tone reflecting an adult scolding a kid for back-sass. I say again with more resolve, "That's really sexist."
We have it out, never getting out of our seats, and eventually I just turn around and ignore his attacks. Really, I get where he was coming from, and I'm sure he had fine, chivalrous intentions, but the way he went about it was extremely sexist, pure and simple. He didn't need to tell that girl what she should and shouldn't be feeling, especially since she didn't care to begin with. He shouldn't have even singled her out when there were plenty of other girls including my friend in the room. What's worse is that I was using the term in a completely different manner that had nothing to do with women in the first place, but he was the one who equated the dirty term to a woman. You had to be there, but the way he said women really perturbed me. He didn't say lady or anything that showed a hint of respect, he spoke as if she couldn't even comprehend or defend herself from my offending.
Let me just say, if she had come to me and told me that I was being offensive to her, I would have apologized without hesitation, even if I didn't exactly agree that the context of the word was offensive to her or not. Hell, if he had come up to me and spoke in a clam and considerate manner that he didn't appreciate my language, I would have readily obliged. Instead, he starts yelling at me across the room, causing utter silence as people stopped what they were doing, then proceeded to single one girl out that he didn't even know, telling me what she was feeling.
This guy pissed me off, he pissed my friends off (half of which are girls!), and I'm pretty sure he disgusted everyone who was in the room at the time based on the looks on everyone's faces.
Well, that's the end of it. Discussion value? Eh, I dunno, I just really wanted to rant about this. How about we just trade stories about our own experience with sexist douchebags?
