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One of the most delightful, unexpected bonuses of being a woman of a certain age is that you become invisible to the subset of creepy men one spends one’s youth dodging or laughing off.
But – I found out recently – sometimes you just get really unlucky.
Five of us – women of a certain age who have been friends for 20 years and have been celebrating being invisible for about 15 of those – booked a table at a restaurant/bar. We were sitting in the very far back corner, catching up, eating our dinner and generally being oblivious to the rest of the place.
One of our party left to go to the bathroom and, in the flash of an eye, a random man had sat down on her chair.
A rather nasty shock for anyone, but particularly for those of us who haven’t had to put up with this particular brand of male privilege for so long!
“Hello girls, what are you all doing out alone?”
Our jaws hit the floor. For one thing, having addressed us in the diminutive plural, we clearly weren’t out alone. We assume he meant out without male chaperones, clearly mistaking a Joburg restaurant for one in Saudi Arabia.
I guess, like too many men before him, he took our stunned silence as a licence to keep speaking.
“Can I get you girls a drink?”
As we were in the middle of sharing two bottles of wine, both of which were nowhere near empty, this seemed unnecessary. Especially as we’d gone out with the intention of buying our own drinks – given that our male chaperones were nowhere to be seen, so couldn’t pick up the bill.
The first of us found her voice and asked him to please move as our friend had been sitting there. He did. He got up, walked to a nearby empty table, picked up a chair, brought it back to our table – and sat down again.
We didn’t see this, as we erroneously assumed he’d left, embarrassed at having behaved so rudely.
At this point, our friend returned to the table and broke the spell of disbelief by telling the guy to bugger off, asking who the hell he thought he was.
He scraped his chair away and was gone.
What had begun as a rather pleasant catch-up between friends became a weary rehash of a discussion about how the hell this rubbish is still happening in 2019.
We looked around us – the three tables near us were all groups of men, yet no one had assumed they were out alone. Of course, we hadn’t been unlucky to attract the creep’s attention; it was just that we were women, and that was enough.
