When I walk around Dundee most days, it can be easy to forget that misogyny exists.
For an hour or two, at least.
Little scraps of rainbow and ribbon from Pride events and reclaimed nights adorn lampposts and shop windows here.
Religious buildings meld with nightclubs and tattoo shops on city centre streets, with bubble-lettered messages of respect and consent in every bathroom stall.
Catcalls are jarring, when they happen, because they’re unusual these days.
With hyper-masculine, misogynistic men’s rights influencers like Andrew Tate being cancelled and men in our community speaking out in opposition to the views he peddles, it can feel like misogyny is finally shrinking back – at least here, in our city.
But an encounter on the last train from Edinburgh to Dundee last weekend brought me slamming out of my optimistic echo-chamber and back to the real world.
What’s the opposite of a meet-cute?
A walking Red Pill Reddit thread of a man, young enough to know better and old enough to be held responsible, sat down across the aisle from our group.
It was clear from the word go, he was positively gagging for a high horse to climb.
Watching how he operated was a mixture of both repulsive and compelling – like watching a glaicket seagull pick apart a bag full of rotting rubbish, or seeing the Tories chortle their way to another unelected government leader.
First, he commandeers a four-person table, guaranteeing that he ends up with a captive audience.
Then, inevitably, his audience arrive – another youngish guy, and two lassies.
They ask to share the table, so they can eat. And for the next 90 minutes, Red Pill holds court, speaking in what I can only describe as a series of drafted Tweets that he hoped would become soundbites.
It was torture.
He unleased his (unasked for, chauvinistic, loud) views on everything from money and marriage to gender and sexuality, with highlights including “the mother of my children isn’t mature enough for me to marry” and “I think the whole transgender thing is fake”.
You can fill in the rest, I’m sure.
After about an hour of his relentless monologuing, the girls’ fake smiles were straining, and they were rigidly facing one another, studiously disengaging from their tablemate.
And instead of taking the hint to leave them alone, he got louder, more animated, more controversial – but never touching. Never shouting. Never swearing.
The silence in the rest of the carriage curdled from incredulous to hostile. But no one did anything.
Manspreading – it’s not just for legs
What could we do? He hadn’t done anything but speak. Yet somehow, without a knee breaching the confines of his seat, he had managed to manspread over the whole damn train car.
It was then I realised that misogyny hasn’t gone away – it’s just got smarter.
It’s evolved from wolf whistles and groping fingers to words designed to poke and prod spines into stiff discomfort, while holding up innocent hands and saying: “I was only having an exchange of views.”
And misogyny, that night, got off the train at Dundee, made its way into our city which is so proud of its progress. It’s at home here.
When the man passed me on the platform, I laughed at him until he ducked his head. I’m not usually intentionally cruel or snide, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Because like a virus, misogyny is mutating to survive in the environments it inhabits. It lives in the line between ‘free speech’ and hate speech, in the small smirk of superiority out the side of a mouth that says ‘that’s just my opinion’.
It breeds a non-physical violence that hangs like a pall over our public spaces. And we must stay alive to it, must recognise it for what it is, and match its sleekit, insidious nature with a ferocious disdain.
If we can’t do anything else, we must laugh at it. Humiliate it into retreat by making those who use it to feel big, feel small. And keep misogyny the hell out of Dundee.
But that’s just my opinion.
I’ll miss Cafe Sicilia – even though I’ve never been
I was gutted to hear about the sudden closure of Cafe Sicilia on Dundee’s Perth Road this week.
Not because I was a particular fan; quite the opposite, I’d never been in.
But for seven years I’ve admired it from the outside, with its striking blue sign and little outdoor seats. And each time I walked by it, I swore to myself I’d go in for lunch “someday”.
Now it’s away, and I feel strangely bereft. It’s funny, how attached we can get to the idea of something without realising.
So I’m taking that as a lesson in not putting things off. Next time I see somewhere I want to try or something I want to do, I won’t wait for a rainy day.
The rainy days are here, so it’s time to seize them… or something. I’ll think up a catchphrase with less cliche-mixing, hopefully.
And whatever replaces Cafe Sicilia, I’ll be the first through the door.
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