Too many of us spend our days swimming through seas of digital filth. Most of it passes unnoticed as we surge up for another breath. Every now and then, however, something particularly rank and slimy gets stuck to the collective forehead. This week it was a post by one Dan Bacon, a self-declared "dating & relationship expert", entitled "How to talk to a woman who is wearing headphones". The headline doesn't get across the full wretchedness of Bacon's imagined scenario. Our expert is offering advice on how to harass strangers walking in peace through city streets.
If you wish to hunt down the piece in the Modern Man – tragically, I fear the site’s name may not be as much of a misnomer as we might pretend – then that option is open to you. But it’s probably best not to give him the clicks. Here’s a summary. The trainee assailant is advised to stand in front of his victim and, wearing “a confident, easy- going smile”, wave moronically in her face until, fearful that a lunge may be imminent, she nervously removes her headphones and begins scanning the pavement for a policeman. (I’m editorialising a little.)
In case she hasn’t yet got the message that you’re a dangerous sociopath, you should then launch a conversation aimed at “acknowledging the awkwardness”. Bacon suggests something like this: “Hey – I know it’s not normal for people to talk to someone with headphones in, but I was walking along and saw you and thought – wow, she’s hot.”
“Hot”? Did you say “hot”?
Bacon offers no advice on what to do if she maces your fat, useless head and kicks you in your tiny, useless testicles. One imagines that will follow in a post entitled “How to cope if, as a poor excuse for a higher primate, you get the beating you sorely deserve”.
More than a few people commented that, moving through the war zone that men have made of the city, women often wear headphones expressly to discourage the advances of the more aggressive bonobo chimpanzees. They also pretend to be on the phone or, when harassment seems imminent, gesture towards imaginary friends in distant crowds. That won’t discourage Bacon and his posse of boundary encroachers. Apparently, “most women are attracted to the strength in men (eg confidence, masculinity)”. The ritual rudeness is, you see, just the sort of thing that arouses frail targets.
You need only glance at Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses or read a Restoration comedy to confirm that the romantic tussle has, for centuries, been seen as a class of structured warfare. You’ll also find theft, murder and sexual assault in classic literature. The antiquity of bad behaviour does nothing to recommend it.
The Modern Man is part of a culture that isn’t really a culture that some people have called pick-up culture. (Again, not a culture.) Adherents refer to themselves as pick-up artists, or PUAs. (They’re not artists). The literature (it’s not literature) that informs this squalid behaviour describes the sexual life in terms of a big-game hunt. Instead of rifles the PUA has a quiver of lame one-liners and a magazine of crackpot sociological delusions. You’ll find a fair bit of the latter in the Modern Man. “Most single women are open to being approached by a confident guy, so that they can have a chance to meet a potential new lover or boyfriend,” Bacon writes in typically blunt style. He quotes no academic studies to support his assertion, so don’t rely on this as a defence if your actions put you before a judge.
The PUA likes to think of public spaces as jungles within which potential prey prowls in various states of camouflage. Of course, as he sees it, the metaphorical big beasts secretly yearn for the grapeshot or the crossbow dart. Such challenges as the wearing of headphones just encourage him to greater excesses of social thuggery.
He is helped in his efforts by an apparent breakdown in the sanctity of personal space. Different cultures have contrasting approaches to this subject. In southern Europe citizens are far more likely to approach strangers and speak to them without introduction. The downside is a greater level of catcalls directed at women. The upside, if you view it thus, is a greater sense of communal spirit.
In northern cities we tended to imagine ourselves protected by a robust transparent membrane. If you are on fire, are desperately in need of money or require directions to some tourist attraction, then by all means tap politely on the cocoon. Otherwise leave me and everybody else alone. I am not your friend (unless I am your friend). Headphones need not be worn to press home this self-evident truth. Go away.
