I finally got to eat at Cecconi's last week, at the Redchurch Townhouse, Shoreditch; something that I've been wanting to do since it opened in October of last year.
Basically a stylish but informal pizza and pasta restaurant, the food and wine is predictable but delicious, and the mostly Italian, mostly female staff are friendly and very easy on the eye. Lunch with Zed should've, therefore, been a perfectly enjoyable occasion.
Unfortunately, however, there was a prick at the next table displaying hegemonic masculine character traits that some - not unfairly - might label toxic; angry, boorish, sexist, super-sensitive to any perceived slight, unable to admit any weakness or failing, etc.
If he was trying to impress the woman he was with on the one hand, he was clearly trying to intimidate the waiter on the other. Thus, for example, when the latter very politely attempted to explain the menu - after being informed of its overly-complex layout - the prick ejaculated: 'I've been to some of the best restaurants around the world so I know how to read a menu.'
A few minutes later, having given his suggestions at how to simplify the menu, he decided he next wanted to discuss staffing levels and complain about what he regarded as a poor quality of service. Then, rather surprisingly, he wanted to know why they didn't lay the tables with white table cloths, as this always adds a little class.
I felt so sorry for the waiting staff. And so sorry for his companion - particularly when, at one point, he left her sitting alone at the table for twenty minutes whilst he took a call on his mobile ...
I don't know what the antidote to this rude, inept, and bullying model of masculinity might be - castration seems a rather drastic last resort - but it would be nice if such men could learn to moderate their own behaviour, check their privilege, and overcome the social and sexual anxiety that surely drives it.
We think, in these situations, the most courageous, authentic (and doubtless un-English) thing would be to make it embarrassingly and loudly clear to the other party how and why such behaviour is intruding on your/your companion's own pleasure (and likely that of others), not to mention the professional well-being of the staff, rather than submitting to bystander syndrome (even at the risk of taking the words out of his partner's mouth or, perhaps, getting your own lights punched out). That's politics, right?
ReplyDeleteWhat we're also mindful of is how people's 'individual' behaviour is always part of a dynamic that constellates and facilitates it – in this case, the unfortunate female sat with him, and the room around them. One would have to wonder what kind of woman (and indeed, throwing the psychic doors wider, what restaurant) sponsors such behaviour – i.e. why didn't she kick him the groin and/or the manager throw him out?
The push-back against so-called 'toxic masculinity' is, of course, very vogueish now. Where it is a matter of reining in the type of sexual assault/assertiveness that women really don't get off on, or spoils their lives, we're broadly in favour of the cultural pendulum swinging back - to a point. However, having been both on the receiving end of an abusive relationship we had the greatest difficulty in extricating ourselves from (and had to resort to an act deemed criminal to do so) and, rather more trivially but still annoyingly, who was recently upbraided by a woman for glancing at her friend's displayed tattoos 'impolitely' in a bar we regularly frequent, the counterpart of 'toxic femininity' (a particularly corrosive amalgam of manipulation, passive aggression/ hostility and entitlement) is, we would suggest, inseparable from it.
To play devil’s advocate against ourselves, and thinking of the above bar room unpleasantness, some readers might find a seam of unexamined ‘sexism’ in the blogger’s casual reference to ‘easy on the eye’ waitresses (and perhaps the odd waiter) – an ‘innocently’ unreconstructed gaze, one might think, that doesn’t want to be disturbed or disrupted. (In the words of the Boomtown Rats, on the other hand, we guess ‘there’s always someone looking at ya’.) The bottom line is, you always take your chance in public space, and you play the best (and riskiest) cards you can.