Eye on Gender

Yesterday, a wonderful warm end of April day when for sure winter is gone and we have the days filled with light, Janie and I sat outside a café in the North Laines here in Brighton and had lunch in the sunshine. It felt like paradise.

Then the young men – student age is how I saw them - sitting on the other tables began to bellow to each other. They were jostling for airtime, and one of them, who kept sitting down when the others stood sometimes, was the leader. They had some plan, which was terribly clever, and of no interest to me, so I didn’t try to understand what it was.

At some stage a couple of young women came up and sat at the table of the leader. They showed skin where they could, and teeth when they smiled, which was all the time. Smiling, smiling is a form of supplication, but it also removes individuality in a way, to me at least. It’s a way of being attractive, looking pleasing, and men do it less. When you do see it is when two gay men meet and have something going on, and they smile smile smile while keeping eye contact. Men are attracted to what they see, which is why gay men often spend more time on their appearance, why they smile more.

Anyway, the leader of the young men treated them in a superior, condescending way – I sense they were something to do with the Plan – and after a while they went on their way. As they vanished down the road they began to be derided, laughed at, as if they were fools. Women!

Now my suspicion is that if one of them found himself alone with these two women, it would have been a different game altogether. And if we put him in a context where the women were at home and he felt uncertain, say in an underwear shop, he would have been in a position of total uncertainty, powerlessness. Their behaviour in relation to the women was mostly an assertion of male power. What is interesting about this is that they feel so uncertain about their masculine power,  presence and being that they need to assert at all.

Men in groups is what we are looking at here, how the nature of the individual man changes when he becomes part of a larger group, and how in this case, and I think in many others – for example on the trading floor of an investment bank – the excitement of the chase, the shared testosterone high, the thrill of certain illusions of power, which includes being more powerful than the feminine as a given, whip the state of consciousness up into a form of passing madness.

The young men in the café, by the way, did not even see us. As middle aged women we were invisible, of no consequence at all. They were totally unconscious of the fact that they were disturbing our lunch with their young broken voice baying, not unsimilar to the sound of stags during rut. Neither were they conscious of the silliness of what they were doing. Here we can see the way perception is so different for individuals and groups. It's all illusion, friends.

To our minds they were children, to their minds something else entirely. Which world view is more real? The one you belong to.