If you’ve never had the pleasure of riding the train from Jersey into Penn Station, let me take a moment to fill you in. The train is crowded with screeching teenagers, businessmen guffawing into cell phones, and travelers with absurdly large suitcases. (Seriously, what do you travel with? Bowling balls? Cans of soup? What?!) It’s an all-around unpleasant experience, but it gets the job done.
This past weekend, I took my new puppy, Reed, for a quick trip down the shore to meet my parents. He is perfect and I love him to pieces. But, his mere 14 pounds can become something of a burden after carting him around in the rain and wrangling whatever crap my parents decided can no longer be stored in their basement.
When the train finally arrived, I decided to settle into the first open spot I found, a three-seater occupied with a young, professional-looking dude and his backpack. I gently put Reed’s carrier down on the seat, and attempted to untangle myself from my wet coat, backpack, and purse. The young professional silently put his hand on his bag and pointedly avoided eye-contact. Everything about him read, “I got here first. In my world, you don’t even exist.”
Ugh! Seriously? Give a girl a break.
But I’m not about to go searching for another seat to just please this guy. Our exchange goes something like this:
“Um, could you maybe move your bag?” (There may have been some ‘tude in my tone. I’m not perfect.)
“Oh, what. You want ME to move MY bag, so you can put YOUR stuff down?”
“Uhh… I don’t… I’m just gonna… sit.”
I squeezed in. He moved his bag, and I slid Reed’s carrier onto my lap.
“Trash.”
Now, I’m not a fighter. I clam up when confronted, and I cry about it later. So I am not the best equipped person to deal with random acts of cruelty.
But this guy had crossed a line. And I was not going to let him get away with that shit. I made a split second decision not to slide back toward the isle, as any normal human being would have. Instead, I planned to sit right next to this asshole for the duration of our hour-long ride into Penn Station.
It was my passive aggressive way of making sure he knew there were consequences to his actions. I figured neither one of us was owed more than one seat. And so neither one of us was going to get one.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Young Professional was seriously pissed.
Strait to me, he hissed, “You fucking cunt.”
So I’ll admit, my point was probably lost on him.
I didn’t want to react, but honestly, I was absolutely shocked by his fury. And his language! On what planet is it OK to speak that way to another human being? He knew nothing about me, and I had done nothing more offensive than sit next to him on a crowed train.
He then proceeded to call me a cunt, like, twelve more times.
He even took my photo and started texting it to his friends. And I expect the C-word was thrown around at least another dozen times among them.
I like to think that I bore this verbal onslaught with composure and without anger. But more he filled the space between us with cunt, cunt, cunt, the more baffled I felt. In all honesty, it really is a powerful word. And the more he used it, the more justified I felt in my “seriously evil plan” to make his trip mildly uncomfortable. Revenge!
And OK, I’ll confess, part of me wanted the situation to explode. For him to try to get physical. For other passengers to get involved. For the conductor to ask me to move, so I could stand my ground in some kind of Rosa Parks-moment. Cunts will NOT move to the back of the train!
However, after about 20 minutes, my seat-mate seemed to accept that I was not going to be moving. He snickered at incoming texts for the rest of the ride, chatted on his phone, and made no further use of the C-word.
But to be clear, even though I was OK in the end, this man’s behavior was absolutely not. Not only is the word cunt basically much the most offensive thing you can call a woman, but the way he slung it around like a weapon made his intention perfectly clear. He said it to be vile. He said it to make me feel less than. And he said it to intimidate me.
I know there are a lot of feminists out there who are reclaiming the word and would be happy to explain why cunt is actually empowering. But honestly, most people would still be offended if called a cunt. And until people stop saying it with such hatred, the meaning and intent doesn’t change.
In truth, the fact that my young professional used the C-word so freely made me wonder if attempts to destigmatize cunt have only succeeded insofar as eliminating whatever stigma there was against using it as a cuss in the first place.
Ultimately, the word did not hurt me. I was not intimidated, and I did not give in. I do wonder, though, if he understood that he’d done anything wrong that day. Or if in his eyes, I really was just a stupid fucking cunt.