Chivalry and headlocks

I had a strange night on Friday.

I went to my friend B's birthday party. We met years ago, at one of the two summer schools for creative writing I went to. She's been great about keeping in touch since, and I am and always will be filled with admiration for her for that. (Even if she occasionally calls me or messages me somehow at inconvenient times.) She's infinitely better than me at initiating and maintaining contact. I have a lot to learn from her.

But that's beside the point. Because weird stuff happened.

And I'm not talking about the bouncy castle in the heavy metal club, though that was pretty weird too. That was fun.

I'm talking about my overprotective side, and chivalry, and the lines between feminism and misogyny, and the etiquette of helping someone.

So, here we go. Part One.

I'd met a couple of B's friends before, at other parties of hers, but she had a new beau (not a boyfriend, they're not quite attached enough for that, she tells me) and a lot of new workmates.

Her boy, A, I had been told in advance, is highly intelligent, well-travelled, well-liked, kind, thoughtful, generous, experienced (hem hem hem) and so on and so forth. Her friend K, I was told briefly, is not particularly liked by the rest of her (B's) friends and workmates, and can be loud and mildly annoying.

So I met them both, and A turned out to be a little bit handsome (I can still tell, you know :P) and quite the charmer. He reminded me a lot of my old co-editor from university, with whom I created one issue of a long-running poetry magazine. Both come across as very sure of themselves, full of funny and interesting stories, very charming, a little bit dashing, all that sort of thing.

K got lost on the way, and we found her by Forbidden Planet. A good place to get lost, I suggested, and promptly revealed that K is a geek. And a bit ditzy, but in a rather sweet, endearing way. At least for the mood I was in; it's entirely possible that if I worked with her for 8 hour shifts day after day she would wind me up. But I can't say, since I don't. I found her rather adorable. She was quick witted and funny, geeky, modest, and inventive - she borrowed B's dressy shoes for the night, which were a few sizes too big, so she tied them on with ribbon, and it looked very good indeed. She wasn't as knowledgeable as many of the others at the party, a lot of whom were older than us, but she would ask if she didn't understand something, and that's a trait I always admire.

So, at this point I liked them both.

K, by the way, is about 5 foot 3 and not exactly built like a tank, and A is 6 foot something or other, with broad shoulders and years of martial arts training.

As the evening went on, and we hung around at an apartment B had rented for the night, waiting for everyone to get together before we headed out, we discussed all sorts of things, and most of the girls teased A by letting slip B had told us some details of their relationship (ahemhemhem). He wanted to know what exactly, and focused on K for some reason, despite the fact that others had said they knew more.

For quite a while A was King of the Castle, holding court and entertaining us all with stories of his travels abroad and the like. We were all suitably impressed, and that and alcohol probably helped contribute to a little flare of self-importance that came across him as things went on. I've spoken to B about all this since, and she freely said, with no prompting, that he can be quite arrogant. She tries to call him on it when she can, and has told him since all this that arrogance really isn't attractive.

Anyway, later on, B left the room for a bit to sort makeup and similar, and I'd moved from my seat on a couch next to K. A told her to go and sit on the couch next to him so he could ask her about this stuff. She, with a laugh, refused, and turned to find me, calling me to sit next to her again so A couldn't.

I went to do so, also laughing, and A dived across to get there first. K swapped to the couch where he'd been, he followed, telling her to stop messing him around or he'd punch her in the face, she swapped back, he followed again, they both went back to A's original couch, K tried to get out the other side and run around the table, and A grabbed her.

He pulled her back, still both just struggling in that joking sort of way people do, and then somehow, instead of holding her arms, he put one arm around her neck and hauled her back onto the couch by the throat.

K, at this point, loses any trace of joking and laughter. She tells him, "Let go, you're hurting me. Get off," and tries to push his arm away and wriggle out.

A pulls her back harder.

So I squirm past the rest of the party, who have fallen a little bit quiet and are blinking at A in surprise, and I grab his arms to help K. I push his arm off her throat so she can breathe, I pull his other hand off her arm so she has room to move, and then he really puts his strength into it.

I focus on keeping his other hand off K, grabbing his wrist with one hand and hauling it away from everybody, and tell K to push his arm off and slide out.

A laughs at us, and mocks us. "It takes two of you to handle me. God, you have no upper body strength. You're so weak. If I wanted to -"

I raise my eyebrows, and my left hand, and show him my nails. "Do you really want me to try?" To prove my point, I dig the nails of my right hand into the wrist I'm holding, just a little.

"Wouldn't bother me," he says, clearly thinking that the nails in the wrist is all I mean. He has no imagination.

K gets out and dives into free space, and A twists the hand I'm holding to grab my wrist in return, pulling me off balance so it's either sit on the sofa arm or fall on top of him. Naturally I go for sofa arm. He grabs K's hairbrush, which has fallen out of her bag in all this, and taunts her with it. She asks for it back, he throws it to the other side of the room.

One of the other boys quietly picks it up and gives it back to her.

At this point A starts in on something K either said while I was out of the room or said at work, or whatever. I have no idea of the context and I don't know why it came up. He insists he never called her stupid, and starts trying to regain lost ground with the crowd, proclaiming he was insulting the education system, not K in particular.

After a few minutes, warily, we both let go of each other's wrist. He keeps on about what he meant when he said this that and the other, and how K's taking it all the wrong way.

I tell him, "I don't know about any of that. I missed the original comment, whatever it was. But the headlock was a bit much, okay?"

"I didn't have her in a headlock," he protests. "I had my arm across her neck, not her throat. She was fine. It was here, I'll show you."

"No thanks," I tell him, fending off his approach. "I could see where your arm was, and you were hurting her. She told you that."

"If I really wanted to put her in a headlock, I'll show you how," he says, and gets up and persuades one of the boys to let him demonstrate. He does a 'proper martial arts' hold, which I've seen before, and offers to teach me how to get out of similar and defend myself should a man attack me.

"I know," I tell him, with a sigh. "Believe me, I know."

Later, when we're out at the club, he pulls me aside and tells me K has wound him up lots before, and he wouldn't want me to think ill of him, and I seem lovely and he doesn't want that to be my first impression.

Honestly, guys. Blokes. Come on. If you don't want my first impression of you to be, "will offer violence to women at the drop of a hat", then DON'T DO SO. Telling me you had reasons to do it afterwards doesn't help.

To be fair, had A had another of the guys in a headlock and said guy was seriously outmatched and crying out, "Let go, you're hurting me," I'd have stepped in and helped him too. I just step in with a little more anger when it's a man throttling a woman.

This is why I do pressups. You'd be amazed how often I need to use force in situations like that. Particularly when I'm the only sober one around.

I'd like to think that A only did this because he truly regards women as equals, and it doesn't occur to him that he shouldn't treat us in the same a-fight-will-solve-it-all way as some groups of men treat each other. But it really didn't look like that. It looked like he knew fine well he had the weight and strength advantage, and was going to use that to get what he wanted.

And that's the bully mentality, and I do not like it, for so many reasons.

Here endeth part one, otherwise the post will be far too long. :)