I'm used to inappropriate and ungraceful attentions from men. It happens. Not just in Tanzania, I used to live in Houston, where street harassment is an unfortunate and upsetting fact of life. Also, I am a woman in a field where women are seriously underrepresented which comes with a lot of less than pleasant social things. Nevertheless, there are still situation that are just so weird and puzzling I am fascinated. Among the new group of volunteers in country (and they are still trainees living with homestay families, they haven't sworn in and gone to site yet), is someone who has been collecting birth dates for all volunteers in country. Reasonable enough, there are people in country who like to make birthday cards for people and it's nice to get text messages from people on one's birthday. This man, however, apparently wanted birthdates so that he could make lists of volunteers organized by astrological sign and calculate his perfect romantic/copulatory partner from among the volunteers. He is making this blatantly obvious by contacting a lot of women who fit the bill (does he not realize we are going to talk to each other about this?), among them me. His desire is, and I quote directly, to "feel the sting of the female scorpio" and I am supposed to be his emotional support. Or something.
I would like to point out that I have never even met this person. This conversation was conducted entirely via text message.
My response was that this would require me to have human feelings and I don't do that. I refuse to even respond to the sting of the scorpio thing. He told me promptly that I shouldn't repress my feelings and substitute hard work for human connection. It's so nice that I have people to tell me what kind of feelings I really have, because otherwise how would I know? I didn't think I was doing any hard work by sitting on my couch watching anime and drinking a mug* of wine before going to bed, but I'm sure students of deriving generic personality phenomena based on extraterrestrial pareidolia know better than I. The conversation ended when I finally told him not to hit on me. I'd be willing to meet up with him because he's Peace Corps, but anything else he needs to approach in a less abrupt and non-personal medium. He did apologize and back off immediately, which was actually a pleasant surprise. Though his next move was to text another volunteer who did a training session for this group of trainees and ask about me. I think he hasn't quite realized how PC communications work, since the first thing this resulted in was the other volunteer contacting me and asking what should be said about me. I said that the party line is that I don't have feelings, and if I were capable of love, it would only be for a computer.
I haven't heard anything from the man since. There was probably a more mature way to handle the situation.
*Only the classiest drinking vessels for the Peace Corps.
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