"You look like you're from San Francisco!"

I promised the blog that I wouldn't get arrested by George Allen's goons, and I made good on that promise. In fact, I only had one brush with Republican wrath the whole time I was in Virginia.

Towards the end of election night, a middle-aged Allen supporter in an orange baseball cap started yelling at me. I don't think he had any idea who I was. He just needed someone small to pick on.

"You look like you're from San Francisco!" he screamed.

Initially, this seemed totally random. Why was this drunk guy yelling about San Francisco? Was it a Nancy Pelosi reference?

"Well," I said, "I'm not, but my mom's whole family is from there. It's very nice. Have you been?"

All of a sudden he got a lot angrier. I looked at him quizzically.

He pointed a skinny finger at me and hollered, "And I bet you look like your mom!"

"Yeah," I said, "A lot."

I suddenly realized that he was trying to gay-bait me for having short hair. Or maybe it was the two huge cameras. What a weirdo. Some of these social conservatives really do imagine that Teh Gays lurk everywhere, waiting to pounce. Or maybe he thinks that accusations of gayness are so awful they can magically subordinate anyone.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have laughed in his face, he was very agitated and close enough to slap me. But that turned out to be exactly the right way to handle him. He just stood there with his orange baseball cap drooping and his mouth slightly agape.

Comments

[Dicky Neely]

Goodbye Macaca!
I'm sorry you were subjected to such an experience but the self-righteous got a bit freaked out in this election so take heart in that! Good job in Virginia to the Webb campaign.
I wish we would have done better in Texas but there are encouraging signs.

[Anthony Damiani]

"Why do rednecks hate San Francisco?"

Because 9/11 devalued New York as a hate target.

[Bruce]

Cranky - I defer re: Texas, it is to me a foreign country.

But if she wore bowling shoes, she would like she lived in Hampden, short or long hair. The city is the home of duckpin bowling.

[hack]

I wish you'd gotten a picture of him.

[otto schmidlap]

Rather than trying to soothe my repub friends' bitterness, fear and loathing of the new Congress I went ahead and rubbed it in some more:
• Enjoy Christmas. We're cancelling it next year.
• We're gonna recognize Cuba, then subsidize their sandwiches
• Free --no, scratch that, Forced abortions abortions for everyone. Guys too.
• Over-the-counter stem cell hair rinse.
• We're bringing back the draft for the sole purpose of letting hippies dodge it so we can give them amnesty again.

[Pennant]

Cranky said: Have to disagree here. The Radical Right, Republicans, and conservatives in general have something visceral against women with short hair... I am not sure what the exact source is ... But I have noticed the dislike among many of my conservative coworkers, both men and women.

I think in their views:

a) short hair is convenient - women should spend hours making themselves pretty for their menfolk by doing things like combing their long hair,
b) the flow of long hair softens body movement and makes it seem less aggressive - women should be pliant, not aggressive,
c) they have domination issues, and you can't pull on a woman's hair to bring her into submission if it's too short,

The reverse is also why they deeply dislike men with long hair. Men are supposed to be strong and dominant and worry about "substance", not appearances. Which conflicts with a), b), and c). Although Fabio seems to get a free pass somehow, perhaps due to a (perhaps steroid-enhanced?) muscular body build and an association with trashy novels where the heroines often fit the conservative mold.

Basically it comes down to: short-haired women challenge the natural order of things - men on top. For conservative men, it's a challenge to their manhood; for conservative women, it threatens their acceptance of "their place in life" as cowardly.

So basically, the worst ones are just pretty screwed up people with a serious lack of self-confidence or a lust for authority who want to impose their views on others to validate themselves.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I wish you'd gotten a picture of him.

Posted by: hack | November 11, 2006 at 04:48 PM

Yes, but don't we all have a picture of him already, in a manner of speaking?

[sara]

Where in Virginia was this?

In the D.C. area women with short hair are most likely not lesbians but liberal soccer moms (or even Republican soccer moms) or working women without time to do their hair.

The red-haired lady in the Borat dinner party scene (weird burgundy red color) looked as if she'd feathered each hair individually.

[Wil Robinson]

Ah, the backbone of any right-wing argument - the name-call!

Sometimes the stupidity just makes me sad instead of angry.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>name-call!

"You--you--San Franciscan!"

[Urinated State of America]

"The lesbians are across the bay in Berkeley. San Francisco according to the stereotype has lots of frustrated straight females because the men are all gay, and similarly with straight males in Berkeley."

OT, but it's true. Five weeks after emigrating to the US and living in the Bay Area. Her roommate said to her at the time "Yeah, get them fresh off the boat while they're helpless." There's an awful lot of B- males with A/A+ women in this area, and I count myself amongst the lucky B- men.

There's a cure for being a single straight female in SF, though, given that one would only be 20 miles north of the Saudi Arabia of reserves of Straight Males Without Girlfriends: Silicon Valley. Someone needs to tell those girls to get their asses to Fry's, cruise the aisles and ask the most-acceptable-as-breeding-stock-geek they find for help with choosing computer product XYZ. (That, is, if said female doesn't mind a borderline autistic spouse.)

Funnily enough, there's a real baby boom in San Francisco at the moment. Lots of strollers in Potero, Bernal, Mission, Noe, even the Castro for God's sake.

[Count Zero]

"Someone needs to tell those girls to get their asses to Fry's, cruise the aisles and ask the most-acceptable-as-breeding-stock-geek they find for help with choosing computer product XYZ."

Us geeks don't actually shop at Fry's, NewEgg is much better, and they deliver. :) Joe Sixpack shops at Fry's because they don't know any better and it looks "techie".

[willie lee]

Haha, thats awesome! I can just see his piggie face filling with rage. You handled that well. I lived in SF for a couple of years and was always irritated when I was traveling and met someone who thought SF was just the Castro and Haight-Ashbury: a seven by seven grid of gays and hippies. I never took it well.

[Tom D.]

For some reason, the phrase "more in hope than in anger" keeps coming back to me...

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>There's a cure for being a single straight female in SF, though, given that one would only be 20 miles north of the Saudi Arabia of reserves of Straight Males Without Girlfriends: Silicon Valley.

Well 40 miles north, but otherwise true; though many have emigrated since the bottom fell out of the economy in 2001, back at that time, I heard one estimate that there were five 18-45 males for every 18-45 woman in Silicon Valley. I still remember that when a girlfriend and I split up, my coworker said: "You had a girlfriend in this city and you guys broke up? Dude, I'm sorry." At the time, although many did have girlfriends in town, I remember many coworkers traveling to other states, or other countries--yes--to be with a girlfriend.

>when I was traveling and met someone who thought SF was just the Castro and Haight-Ashbury: a seven by seven grid of gays and hippies.

I met a guy from New Jersey who asked if there was an intersection of Polk and Castro. "Whadda the gay people just f--- on the street there? Cops walk by, 'hey, there's Pat and John, f---in' again' (waves)." When people come here from out of state, they do seem obsessed with it. For the record, about 15% of San Francisco's population is gay, according to our local news station.

[Sean]

"You look like you're from San Francisco!"

Michael Savage (aka Weiner) lives in San Francisco...these idiots have no fucking clue.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Although, forgive me, if Michael Savage doesn't sound like a gay porn star name...

[J.C. Wilmore - The Richmond Democrat]

I'm just disappointed that you apparently were in Richmond and I didn't get to meet you.

What an insane night that was. I spent the first part of it standing in the rain at a polling place. Then I spent the rest of the nighht adding up vote totals from precincts as they came in, trying to figure out if Jim would win.

Hopefully you were able to see some of the nicer parts of Richmond and didn't spend all your time with the Republicans.

[CJColucci]

Were you wearing flowers in your hair? (Am I dating myself with that one, or what?)

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>Were you wearing flowers in your hair?

That is a _beautiful_ song, no shame. Although, the sitars in that one during the "People in Motion" break, as in "Love You To" by the Beatles (another great song) unfortunately render me unable to play them with any company present. Just the sound of the sitar automatically causes the other person to bring an imaginary joint to their lips and mock smoking it, "twsh-twssshhhh..."

[cfrost]

What an insane night that was. I spent the first part of it standing in the rain at a polling place.

An illustration of how seriously we really take democracy. Any supermarket can get ten people past a cash register in the time a typical polling place gets one voter processed. Every election evening on TV we see lines of voters at polling places and we're supposed to think this is wonderful. “Look at the people participating in our most sacred act of civic life.” It’s not a lump I get in my throat when I see this shit, it’s more like bile.

Oregon has the right idea: eliminate polling places altogether and do it by mail.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I wish I'd had more time in Virginia. We could have had a terrific blog meetup, or two. I didn't realize I had so many friends in the state until I mentioned I was on the way--J.C., Roxanne, J-Train, SamC...

Unfortunately, I literally spent the whole time working or traveling. My big recreational destination was a name-brand Waffle House for breakfast on morning after the (then-presumed) Webb victory.

I really enjoyed both Northern and Southern Virginia, though. I look forward to my next visit!