Sexist Fucking Anti-Disneyland in the Train Restaurant Car?

Hopefully, this post will completely horrify you. If so, then I've done my job. Not that I get, like, paid to toss out any of the malarkey I spew, but it's my job anyway, and I try to do it faithfully.

I wander back to the restaurant car on the train. I have enough food to eat, but what the hell, it's the experience that counts. I order some potatoes mixed with onions and mushrooms and other stuff. They are delicious.

There is this older, gray-haired, businessy-looking guy sitting across from me at a booth who is really creeping me out. He is one of these hyper-aggressive Russians, very demonstrative in his gestures, and extremely  loud. He keeps calling the waitress over and getting really physical with her. First he is rubbing on her arm while she is talking to him. Then he is stroking her butt next time she comes over. Then he calls her over again, and he is stroking his hands up the back of her leg and reaching up her dress to touch her butt.  I am doing a double-take, and thinking, what the flying fuck, do I step in and say anything. She is acting stoic about it. She's not, like, smacking him for getting out of line, or trying to move out of the way, or seeming to talk to her colleagues about what an asshole he is. Just acting professional, and trying to take his order. Every time she walks by, he gets all touchy, and she seems to be taking it in stride. None of my business, I tell myself. I don't know anything about the cultural cues here. I mean, I don't know if we have some kind of sixties "Mad Men" situation here where men are just condescendingly treating the women around them as their playthings, and that is embedded in the culture (to the detriment of those negatively affected by it), or if she has some kind of rapport with this guy.  None of my fucking business. None of my fucking business. Stay the fuck out of this interaction in Russia. But I am seriously ready to push his nose up into his brain with the heel of my hand if necessary. And I am really tempted to type a message into Google Translate for her to see if there is a hostage-y deal, and if intervention is warranted. But I don't.

She comes back and sits across from him at the booth. They seem to have some conversation that gets slightly agitated after a while. Both of them seem to be scolding each other. Then it calms down, and he shows her something on his phone. She watches for a while, and then shows him something on her phone.  They finish their conversation, he pays and leaves. I am just sitting there thinking, "what the fuck just happened here?" But, it's none of my fucking business.  And, jeebus, I didn't even want to look behind me to see how any of the other guys in the restaurant car were interacting with the waitress.

Somehow, it makes me flash back to the hostel I stayed at in Melbourne, Australia, in the St. Kilda district. I think I talked a little bit about this in a prevous blog post, but here is more about it, now that I have had some processing time. There were two English guys there that I nicknamed "Predator" and "Sidekick." Predator was the lead asshole, and Sidekick was his Boy Wonder figure. Predator was just treating all the women in the hostel like he owned them. His thing was doing handstand push-ups up against the wall while he grunt-counted loudly. Sidekick boasted how he hadn't eaten a vegetable in ten years (kudos, dude, on your unhealthy lifestyle...your arterial hardening will be a capstone of your misplaced attempts at masculinity). Their latent homosexual bonding consisted of saying the most insulting things about women that they could muster, and expecting the other guys in the room to nod/leer in bro-hood. I mostly tried not to interact with them at all.

Well, of course, this dynamic duo of cringeworthy behavior got predictably sauced later that night.  They stormed back into the room, and spent the night smacking the women awake in the wee hours, climbing into their beds and trying to make out with them, (mostly Predator while Sidekick cheered him on), and pissing them off vigorously, though one woman seemed to be accepting of this behavior, giggling and giving make-out-y cues. I was barely awake as this was going on, or I would have definitely said something about the women who were complaining. One woman recounted the tale to me the next morning about how she told them to back off, and both of them laughed it off and called her a cunt, whereupon she sang it to them with some severe vitriol. I was drifting in and out of sleep while this whole disaster happened. Mostly I remembered this whole night of carnage through the recounting of it to me the next morning by Taylor, the Canadian woman who called them out, as I was not really in a state of full consciousness. And she was really pissed because she had been especially helpful to them in giving them some job leads for their working holiday in Australia, and they repaid her with this reprehensible bullshit.  I think that even if anyone in the room was digging what was going on, it affected others seriously negatively.  To his credit, Sidekick did apologize to Taylor the next day.

Anyway, my whole point on this is I often have no clue as to whether to step in and say that seemingly rapey stuff is not fucking OK, or whether I would be interfering with somebody's consensual kinda dommy-subby thing. Sometimes it's damn clear, and sometimes it's not. And, hey, I am interested in exploring the possibility of having a rubby-nubby thing with someone who wants to touch me in secret places just as much as the next hominid. But I am totally not into doing things to other people that they don't want done to them, or giving my approval to anyone else doing that. 

I get the feeling that even talking about it opens me up to a rash of shit from hell from all sides in a rage-filled, badly askew world, but here it is anyway; let your neurons be rubbed raw with whatever. Cheers.