Snapped ? Why ? How ? And ? Haha , well coming around to answering your questions eventually.
So here’s the thing, as a young girl growing up, I have always been asked to be polite , courteous and accept compliments even when I’m not interested in accepting such compliments but you’re a woman and really don’t have a ‘right’ to reject compliments from men.
So all my life even when the compliments and advances was a nuisance and really unwanted, I still had to go through the performative motions of smiling and saying thank you for showing a modicum of interest in me .
But all this came to head one fine Sunday morning in 2020. If you ask me i would say that was my road to Damascus moment, my aha moment and the day I said I’m done with being performative and trying to be nice .
I went out to wash my car, now at the washing bay there were not enough seats and the staff were working around to get me one. I was perfectly fine standing and waiting for them to finish washing my car.
Near where I was standing was also a waiting customer who was wearing a wedding band sitting(I had greeted him when I got there and nothing more ) .
He looks up to me and asks Why Don’t You Come Sit on my laps
I was confused momentarily because I thought I had heard wrong .
Then I asked him to repeat just for clarity , he boldly repeated it with a grin .
And then I SNAPPED !
Proceeded to tell him off without mincing words or trying to sugarcoat on how this was very inappropriate and wrong . You don’t know me, and very obvious you’re a married man, why on earth would you ask a stranger to come sit on your laps because they were standing?
If you were trying to be chivalrous, you would have gotten up and offered me your seat not ask me to come sit on your laps like we knew each other when we didn’t at all.
Mr laps definitely felt chastised and mumbled some unintelligible apologies and I kept it moving.
Haha, you would think one experience like this is enough for a Sunday right ? I guess not because on my way home from the washing bay, I stopped to buy food from the roadside , across the road , I saw a man busily signaling me for my attention, of course I ignored him , finished buying my food and went to sit in my car and drove off.
Alarmingly, I realized a few minutes after driving off that the guy was following me!
Someone might aaw and say how cute yada yada but I felt violated!
I had seen your attempt at attention and flatly ignored it , why the beeswax were you going to think I would be flattered at you following me like a stalker ?
So I stopped at a junction hoping just hoping that I had gotten it wrong but of course I wasn’t , he stopped by me , asked why I had ignored him by the roadside like he was entitled to my attention.
Well remember I had fire in me from giving it to Mr. laps at the washing bay so in a no holds barred dressing down I told him in no uncertain terms how abhorrent and stupid his actions were and they were not in anyway welcome. Dude was shocked because I bet that he wasn’t used to being rebuffed but this Sunday I had snapped and wasn’t holding no prisoners!
I got home feeling very satisfied, it was a feeling of coming of age : yes I was a 35yr old woman but for all my adult life , I have had to be coy and accepting of men’s compliments even when I didn’t want to so these two experiences were quite an awakening experience and guess what ? I LOVED IT ! I felt free and liberated. It had taken so long but yes I was here finally and I was giving to live every moment of it .
See my dearest reader, the teaching of girls to be receptive and gracious of compliments from men without any complaints has damaging effects on our self esteem and who we allow in our lives because we should be grateful a man expressed interest in us even if it was aggressive and unwanted, how terrible!
I know I have seen a lot of conversations and jokes on the internet around the fact that women only act this angry about your advances when they don’t like you, but the guys they like haha it’s a free pass for them and no stress at all.
While this may be true to a certain extent, I kinda disagree. Approach is everything and some actions are a turn off no matter how cute you might want to situate it.
Hopefully as new age parents, we do better and raise our girls to reject likeability and focus on us , we first !
Ending the post with a quote from Chimamanda Adichie :
“Teach your girl child to reject like ability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self , a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people”
