She was doubling over in pain. Straining to form coherent sentences. Wincing and groaning and cursing in frustration at this non-stop grind of blinding pain. Apparently, gallstones fucking suck.
A few nights ago, I brought my friend to the ER. The only place where you can legally get good and proper pain relief in Sweden. And pain relief was sorely needed. She had gotten home from work, huffing and puffing in agony, gone straight to bed, and following a few ineffectual doses of over-the-counter pain killers, she’d had enough.
So why did I go with her? Technically, she could walk on her own. The hospital was just a few stops out. But as far as I’m concerned, if a friend of yours needs to go to the hospital in the dead of night, you fucking go along with them. No discussion. No complaints. You just fucking go, and try your best to make the visit as un-horrible as you can.
Because friends help each other.
Which is why I get a bit miffed when we’re about to get off the tram, just outside the ER. A lady, of some forty years of age, bounds ahead of us in the tram aisle. As if to get off ahead of us. But she stops. Swivels around. Ignores me completely as I’m offering my friend an arm for support, and pins my friend with a look. And asks; “do you need help?”.
There are very few ways to interpret that question. My friend is just about to get off the tram, right outside the hospital. My friend has company, obviously, as she’s holding onto my arm as she’s getting up from her seat. So what help is this judgemental samaritan referring to? Help that precludes my involvement completely? Would my friend be better off for the last hundred meters with a stranger’s help than with mine? Why ask my friend, who is in such debilitating pain to such an extent that she barely remembers the details of this particular encounter, and not her escort, who seems to be sober and able?
Because the implication here is that I, the assistance, the escort, the support, was the cause of my friend’s pain. Because if a woman is shuffling in agony to the ER, arm in arm with a man, one of the first assumptions are that the man caused the woman her grief. That just because my friend is hurting, I’m abusive. Naturally.
This distrustful deliverer is just the tip of the ice berg. If one Swede acts on her leery suspicions, odds are excellent that another ten Swedes are thinking it. Imagining how I’ve gut-punched my female companion, and am now following her to the hospital just to make sure she won’t tattle on me. The preconception that just because I’m white seemingly cis-male, I’m also violent towards women, isn’t just a prejudiced sickness among the general population; it is also ingrained in our public administrations. Because as we get to the hospital, I’m asked to wait for a moment to let the nurses have a chat with my friend on their own. Beyond my watchful reproach. Just in case I’m the cause of my friend’s malady.
I am, while helping my female friend to the ER, judged by the court of public misconception as being abusive until proven otherwise. By kinsmen and state alike.
Y’know what? I get why. I have been told that I can be… intense. Intimidating, even. I’m well aware that I wield a resting bastard-face. I am also keenly aware that it’s in high fashion for the news media to report on all the wicked men that batter, abuse, and murder women left and right. Listening to the news, you might think that there’s a violent pandemic of gendercide going on. And oh so many influencers, political figures, and pundits are all to happy to retrace the image of men as being brutish ticking time-bombs. All of us inclined, or at the very least capable and willing, to beat the living shit out of the “fairer sex” at a moment’s notice.
I mean, it’s not like it doesn’t happen. Just a few days ago, a mob of men torched a woman in India as she was on her way to court to testify against a guy raping her. All autumn, Swedish police has been looking for parts of a 17-year old girl that supposedly got murdered by a jealous boyfriend. That shit does happen. But the news just look at the worst parts of reality. Mundane, banal, truth isn’t half as fun as the morbid statistical outliers. And right now, it’s right up the public’s alley to paint Satan’s own horns on the forehead of men, guilty and not alike.
Once we got back from the ER, my friend doubted my perception of the evening. She didn’t recognize my retelling of how the capricious do-gooder on the tram had offered to save my friend from my evil clutches. She excused the nurse’s exclusion of me as a reasonable precaution that may very well save some woman’s life.
And fair dukes. My prickly skin can withstand being prematurely arbitrated as being an abusive monster if so such judgement can help save some poor woman from her demon. If someone gets well needed help just because I get demeaned and demonized, isn’t that a slim price for my pride to pay?
Maybe. But riddle me this: What happens if you gender-bend these circumstance just a bit? What if the assumption was, when a woman brings an ailing man to the hospital, that she had poisoned him? What like a witch from stories of old might’ve. Does that presumption taste just as reasonable to you? Or does that perchance carry with it the foul stench of misogyny? Or what if we twist the ethnicity and situation around for a spell, in another mental exercise. What if not a white, but a black man, was presumed guilty of wrong-doing before any evidence to the contrary had surfaced? Is it okay for, let’s say, policemen to stop a coloured person to search or question them, just in case that person was about to or had done a crime? What if the person that was stopped looked Muslim? No, that sort of harassment isn’t very seemly, is it? That too carries with it a particularly nasty stench, does it not?
The #metoo movement justifiably dug up a lot of dirt. It got all of us thinking. It is working on prying eyes open among the public. Eyes that have for centuries been crusted over with chauvinism. It is still working on the wheels of industry and power to elucidate how women have been mistreated by power over the years. It would be a damned shame if that force of justice became twisted and turned into just another form of oppression, dehumanization, and prejudice, wouldn’t it…
/Sebastian Lindberg 17/12-2019
WastedWords 