The XX Factor

Don’t Get Lost in the Clouds: This Election Is a Referendum on Boorish Masculinity

Stay focused.

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I first saw the bros in the Buenos Aires, Argentina, airport but forgot about them until it turned out that the muscly one was seated directly in front of me, in the exit row that kicked off our section of economy class. He languorously stretched his legs into the uncluttered space in front of him and began to shout stuff at his buddy a few rows down. It was Monday. The election was the next day.

We took off and leveled out. Muscly bro reclined his chair-back into my lap. This is OK, I intoned to the rage-gremlins in my head, even as my eyes measured all the extra legroom his first-row seat afforded him. This is normal airline behavior. I squiggled my legs into an s on the cushion, tucked my feet underneath, and tried to take up less room. Gazing out the window, I willed myself to be fascinated by the clouds.

The flight attendants had given their safety presentation first in Spanish, then in English. I couldn’t tell which passengers understood what.

After a while the stewardess appeared from behind the curtain, pushing a large metallic food cart. “Beef or chicken?” she asked muscly bro.

He grinned. “Surprise me,” he said.

“OK, um. Do you, um, prefer beef or chicken?”

“Which do you recommend?”

“Well, one is … beef. The other is—”

“You seriously can’t tell me which one is better?”

“Honestly, they’re both airplane food. But people tend to like—”

“I guess I’ll have both then.”

She dropped off his two trays, her manner frosty, and he started making fun of her to his friend. “Someone needs to calm down,” he said. Later, she came back through with the drinks cart, and he ignored her as she asked him twice whether he’d like anything. The third time, he detached one of his headphones from his ear and replied, “Obviously not.”

At that point I decided to get really into the clouds. I mean, the guy was an asshat, but it wasn’t my business. We were going to land in Houston and disembark and the Spanish speakers would speak Spanish and the English speakers would speak English and we would have all spent 10 hours hurtling in the same direction. That was important. Where we were going, race, gender, class, and creed weren’t supposed to count against a person’s humanity. A ghostly cumulus bloomed against the window, reminiscent of one of Washington, D.C.’s lovely stone monuments evanescing up to greet us.

Since then, here’s what I’ve decided about clouds. They can be a big distraction. A sexist, entitled jerk was rude to a stewardess and someone—me, for instance—should have stood up for her but didn’t. This happened fewer than 24 hours before the country was to undertake what is in part a massive referendum on boorish masculinity and the careless abuse of power.

A lot of Americans today probably paused over their ballots to contemplate the beautiful verities that sustain our democratic experiment. I was not one of them. Walking to the polling station, I only thought of the dude who thought it was OK to be rude to a woman he’d never met. Casting my vote, I thought about her.