I was at the mall yesterday afternoon getting some bubble tea. I went up to the register, gave the young lady behind the counter my middle name, (mainly because I didn’t want to put her through the dance of trying to say and spell my name correctly) and then proceeded to wait a good long while because as it turns out, Fridays are high tea time days. In the queue ahead of me was a young man and his friend. Let’s say his name was Richard. Richard and his buddy were also waiting for what was probably some strange concoction of sugars and jellies that teens would order because with their metabolisms they could get away with it. From the outside, they seemed like typical teenage boys.
A group of girls walked by all of us, Richard, turns to one of the girls specifically and say “hello” to her. She gives home a look, and says to him,
“Leave me alone, Richard (again, not his name), I hate you.” she continued on, didn’t miss a beat. Richard turns to his friend smiling, talking and chopping it up like any other Friday. I thought she was a little hard on Richard, but assumed it was just the typical high school tomfoolery.
A few minutes went by, and another group of girls came along, this group had a girl in a shopping cart. Richard, says something inaudible to the young lady in the cart, to which she responded,
“Fuck you, Richard. Leave me alone, I hate you.”
Okay, so here is where my curiosity is piqued. The group of girls have come and gone, yet the young lady’s words are still hanging around my head. But to my surprise, they haven’t seemed to phase Richard one bit. He has yet again, turned to his friend and continued on his jabbering without a care in the world.
This is where my story should end. But life decided to throw another group of girls in our direction. To which again, Richard says hello to one of all of them. I wasn’t paying too much attention, because there was no way that...
...”Leave me alone, Richard. I hate you.”
Like after Peter denouncing Christ three times, I swore I heard a rooster crow.
I looked over at the blonde haired, blue eyed boy with the grin on his face. Yet again, no emotional response from either him or his friend. But this time, I didn’t see a good kid. This time, I saw a kid who was going to grow up harassing women and getting his rocks off doing it.
In my head, I went over every possible scenario I could think of; was Richard being picked on? Maybe he’s trying to be nice, maybe this is just the shenanigans that friends get into with their friends?
Nope. He went out of his way to look for the encounters and he showed no shock or discouragement after each encounter. Also, none of those girls were in the same group of friends. They obviously knew him from school but they rocked different social groups. And none of them acknowledged Richard’s friend, so Richard didn’t hang out with any of those girls.
I even played a little devil’s advocate, tried to see if the girls were the ones at fault. And as soon as I tried to suss out that scenario, I realized what I was doing. I was victim blaming.
Those girls were being completely and totally straightforward with Richard. For whatever reason, they hated Richard, and they wanted him to leave them alone.
And as I looked at Richard’s face, as tried to make sense out of this kid, he stopped being Richard. Richard was a Dick.
Dick went beyond pulling pigtails on girls in the playground. Dick got off on getting any reaction from women. He took negative responses not as deterrents, but as welcomed invitations to harass them further.
I looked into Dick’s future and I saw every asshole comment I’ve seen online to women from guys who pretend to be “good guys”. I saw the women that would actually give this guy a chance and the terrible way he would treat them because Dick didn’t ever learn to respect them. I saw a scary future that, without someone setting this kid straight, would send him and someone else down a terrible path.
I wanted to tell Dick not to be a dick, but it would have fallen on deaf ears. After all, three young ladies straight up told this kid to leave them alone, and all he did was smile and shrug it off.
Don’t be a Dick.
