Follow The Script

By Erica Ewart

It was a tight game between us four women and it was coming down to the throws of the last few discs.  I was standing on the opposite end of the shuffleboard table with my opponent as my partner carefully lined up her throw and then released.  It was coming towards us in a nice clean line, poised to give us the points we needed for the victory, when suddenly, the disc stopped.

A hand had jutted into our game and prevented us from ever knowing the full life of that disc. I was stunned. I had not predicted this in the trajectory of that seemingly perfect throw. As I came to and looked up to find out who belonged to the rest of the hand, my eyes slowly came to rest upon a man.  He was looking at me and my opponent, laughing, a smile on his face.  He was amused at himself for foiling the throw, looking to us for our delight and recognition of his interruption into our game.

However, without a response in sight he quickly released the disc and stepped back from the edge of the shuffleboard table, finding steadiness on the wooden paneled wall next to the restroom where I presumed he was seeking relief.

I did not want to give him any.

I could feel the poorly lit room tightening around me, the downstairs bar continuing to fill up with patrons out to celebrate the end of the workweek.  In my peripheral I could see them navigating their own interactions, women with revealing necklines and men dressed in casual and conservative collared attire. They were sitting around bar tables laughing, flirting, drinking down libations with ease and relief, annoyingly not aware of my urgent internal conflict.

In returning my gaze back to myself I could feel my body tensing up under my t-shirt, the pressure mounting for a needed response. This tension hadn’t been created from a particularly uncommon scene or circumstance at a bar. In fact, I’ve been in this dilemma before. But something was exceedingly different for me on this night in this particular interaction with the man.

It felt like an instantaneous awakening, a sudden and shockingly clear awareness of my body’s gender performance and what it was to be “female” in response to “him” in that moment. For the first time I was intensely in tune with the narrative and script that was being read by my body which was prompting me to give the next line on the page.

My Script read: smile at him politely, maybe giggle at his flirtatious gesture, and then communicate coy delight. This is what a woman should do in order to reflect back to a man that his interruption was flattering, funny and of course that I ultimately wanted him to impose; even though I had not been showing any prior signs of requesting his presence—other than being a female.

There was a forceful, almost magnetic pull to respond according to this internalized gendered script. The script and it’s authors were coercing me to protect the man with my own subjugated response, to protect his sense of what it was to be a man. From my experiences this meant: “real men demand what they want and then take it”.  I felt the need to acknowledge his “manliness” through my behavior by mirroring back pleasure from his penetration into the game.

It was a sudden and horrifying awareness that my mind was grasping to understand, unnerving when it came to the realization “I have never actually made a conscience decision to sign my body up for this role”.

As my internal dialogue worked to make sense of “this” role, I managed to land on a tolerable response and proceeded to withdraw my eyes from the man with only a flash of recognition. I shook my head from side to side in annoyed bewilderment and sent the disc back to my partner for a re-throw, all the while with a slight discomfort and insecurity that his script was now telling him of me “what a bitch”.

This impossible bind and subsequent navigation through the thin narratives of subjugated “good” girl and dehumanized “bitch”, were however, not the only discomfort I had in those few moments of interaction.

For when I did look at the man another narrative was simultaneously present in me: I noticed that he was a man of color (from my perspective an Asian-American man).  I was aware of the script in our white supremacist culture that produces a hierarchy of “manliness” in which Asian features are scripted to be more effeminate and thus lesser.  After my response this script was playing for me as well. I do not consciously agree with the script, but that does not matter to the impact that my response may have had on him. I felt a sense of guilt, a wondering if I had just added to that painful narrative in my response. I wanted to tell him “I see you are a man (and it’s possible he doesn’t identify that way), I consider you a man, I just don’t want you thinking you need to enter my space to have me/you confirm that”.

Maybe that’s what I should have said. I honestly don’t know. That’s the complexity, that’s the important conversation. There are multiple narratives intersecting simultaneously, how do we find one another in discussion and relationship and not perpetuate these narratives in a harmful way?

What a conversation could have also unearthed is yet another narrative that was currently still tethered to our performances. Unbeknownst to the man, I was standing before him a lesbian woman. Just as he did not represent the idealized “man” in our white supremacist hetero-patriarchy, I did not represent the idealized cis-gendered “woman”.  We were face to face with my truth hidden amongst silence (he, unable to silence his difference), a truth that could have possibly brought us together in solidarity.

Looking back, it has a sad and painful irony that manifests everyday in our human interactions. The very scripts we perform to prop us up, that we follow to be “normal”, the ones that we are sold and believe will enter us into relationship (man intruding with dominance into a woman’s space to try to connect ) are actually the very narratives that keep us apart.

These complex and layered scripts are playing out every day. In this case, they were packed into a brief moment and the short life of a thwarted shuffleboard disc.

I sit here today asking many questions from this particular night’s interaction: what narratives are in my body and how are they intersecting with one another to create a performance?  Within these narratives, how do I participate in my body as a white woman, as a lesbian woman, as a cisgender woman, as a middle class U.S citizen?

I don’t have many answers to these questions, but I do know I want to slow down, to notice my body and my important role in perpetuating and protecting privilege.  I want to understand my body’s reaction to oppression.  I want to choose differently, to choose with consciousness, to not perpetuate but instead connect and create a different possibility for relationship.

Because what I do understand from this night, is that neither the man nor I benefitted (or connected) by following the dominant scripts that were written for that interaction.  And I suspect the writers of these narratives intend for just that very result.