There had been an odd air of menace on the train back from London in the early hours of this morning. People seemed pretty drunk and freaked out which was odd given they'd just been on a Monday night out. Two girls sat across the aisle from us, dressed in their skimpy party finest, talking loudly and vociferously angry that some men up the carriage were staring at them.
I am not entirely sure the men were staring and if they were it was a possibility that they were just looking to see where all the noise was coming from. Women should of course be allowed to dress however they want without harassment from strangers, but in this case they were getting no noticeable harassment and seemed to be trying to create it. I looked at them too, but out of concern that everything was OK. I looked at the men too to check that they were not being unreasonable. I would have been prepared to intervene if I felt any lines had been crossed.
They were women in their twenties and they weren't wearing many clothes, so I think that they would probably expect to get some male attention. I wondered, in fact, if in this instance the women were slightly annoyed that they weren't causing more of a commotion. The angrier and more vocal one was perhaps not as irresistible as she thought and it would have been quite interesting to see what would have happened if one of the men I had said, "I'm not staring at you, I'm staring at your mate. She's much better looking than you."
Luckily no one did as I think the angrier girl would have gone ballistic at this point.
I am not for one second trying to say that women should have to put up with any aggro and even as a man I am scared by groups of men on late night public transport (or pretty much anywhere). It's easy to get paranoid and see a threat where this isn't one. And we all know that there are enough occasions when there are nasty incidents and unpleasant leering so it's not ridiculous that these women were feeling cornered and wanted to strike out. But if you're drunk you can sometimes think you're the centre of attention when you aren't.
If you're thinking that maybe I am being sexist, then I could add that the men were Asian and the women were white and I wonder if in actual fact the woman's reaction had a racist element to it. But maybe I am just racist myself for imagining that. Oh it's so complicated.
The women switched seats so that the men who might have been looking at them (for whatever reason) wouldn't be able to look at them. Which might have been enough of a solution without shouting about it.
I think in this particular case the women were mistaken and paranoid and a bit too drunk. The evidence seemed to rack up in my favour - my wife told me that they'd been loudly protesting that they'd stab anyone who looked at them, which seemed an unnecessarily aggressive response to something that wasn't really happening, but also when the train driver announced that the next stop was St Albans they looked confused and wondered if they were going the wrong way. And it was only when they got to St Albans that they realised that they definitely were and got off. It's quite hard to go the wrong way on these particular platforms.
As they got off the angrier woman then shouted again. A man sitting next to me said, "Are you all right?" with what I thought was genuine concern, but she started wailing about him staring at her as well. It seemed all the men were staring at her. Wherever she went men couldn't get enough. I thought about making my joke about her friend being more attractive at this point, but even though I had just come off stage and been saying awful and wrong things with Charlie Brooker I was sober and wise enough to keep my mouth shut. Also I might have been stabbed.
The man sitting next to me stayed sitting next to me, with his leg touching mine, even though there were now four spare seats across the aisle. I nearly shouted at him too. The bloody weirdo. "Are you staying over here because you want to rub against my leg? Is that what you're up to? Stop judging me as a sexual object." I failed to say. I was glad to get off at the next stop. My wife agreed that it had been an odd journey and that the girls had been at fault here.
Hellish late night train journeys and stupid drunk men and women are the main reasons I am looking forward to getting back home to London.
But horrible, leering men can be an issue for women, as I address in
this week's Metro article.
All the latest news about what I am up to this summer can be found
in my June newsletter.
