To the Men in the Bar

You’re not funny.

The bartender knows you pay her tips, so she smiles at your offensive comments, but probably dies a little inside when you keep casually drawing attention to her chest. No one wants some creepy man referring to her breasts as “the twins” with a leery grin and self-satisfied chuckle that can only mean you think she thinks you’re God’s gift to man or appreciates the attention.

Neither are true.

More than likely she grits her teeth behind a smile because not only will she jeopardize her job and her tip if she speaks up, but risks your wounded backlash, the inevitable “bitch” or worse at her rebuff.

Your jokes about “gay midgets” coming out of the cupboard aren’t funny either. The one about the lady “midget coming up on you” is even worse. Maybe I wouldn’t find you so repulsive if you treated anyone other than the other balding, pot-bellied white males around you like people, rather than objects of your crude humor.

Then you bring politics into it (why not? The President has made this rhetoric acceptable, so you feel even more empowered) and my cheeks burn, and I wonder if I’m going to be stoned in the town square. I’ve voted Republican and Democrat, and feared candidates on both sides of the party line. At this point, sirs, nothing scares me more than a country where seemingly racist bigot voices like yours are given a national platform—free speech or not.

Maybe I’m being too sensitive. Isn’t Mercury in retrograde, or something?

Maybe, but you still soured my whiskey old fashioned. I still find you as deplorable as your bad jokes and as sad as your chances of ever seeing the “twins” up close.

For now I’ll pity your wives—if you have them—or better yet, I’ll be grateful that my hubs never talked to me that way…

Even when I was a bartender.