How to Get Assaulted and Thrown Out of a Lesbian Dance by a Man

For this pride season I thought I would offer advice for those women who would like to experience getting thrown out of a lesbian Pride dance by a bunch of men because one of the men grabs you aggressively and inappropriately. I’m writing this this weekend, in case any women would like to experience this in 2016-like at the All Woman Pride Dance tonight in Santa Fe. Maybe you can write a poem or short-story afterwards, or invent an interpretive dance, after having that kind of “learning experience.”

Setting the Stage for Your Assault

1. First, it’s all in the planning. Make sure the LGBT planning committee hires a man with a reputation for violence to run the women’s lesbian dance venue. First things first. (Bear in mind these members may or may not have known about him beforehand.). It works either way.

2. Second, insure the All Women’s Pride Dance is run by a someone who appears to really dislike (possibly even hate) women, evident from past behaviors and who also has a reputation for hostility and being very hard to work with or get along with. Remember women, if you want to get violated, you need to plan ahead and pay attention to these details!

3. Make sure you hire exactly the man that the organizers for other Women’s Dances refuse to work with on the grounds that said man is rude, intransigent and impossible to work with.

3. Make sure that all but one of the security team are men, hired by the highly problematic manager. Make sure she is a late arrival when the crisis goes down.

3b. For an added ironic twist, hire a gay man who has these behavioral traits.

4. Insure that everyone in authority at the venue has been thoroughly schooled in the Blame the Victim Manual 101.

          Yes women this looks like a lot of work and what I’d say to that is: you gotta’ put the effort in so that you can assaulted easily and fluidly, no matter what you say in your defense when it goes down.

And then I would say: actually, this shit pretty much arranges itself—it’s like our culture is set up for this or something. So although it looks like it might be a difficult thing to arrange for a manager of a women’s dance to act threateningly to more than one woman at the dance, if you have the right ingredients, it is actually phenomenally easy! Who knew?

5. Insure that the venue runs out of freely available water about 5 hours into the evening, on a summer night, making it necessary for all the women to go to the bartenders to get water, bearing in mind that most of the women had been buying liquor all night and that most women stop when they have had enough, so we aren’t banging into each other on the highway on the way home—I believe it is called Responsible Lesbian Drinking Behavior or RLDB.

Note that you only need one bad apple. The rest of the bartending staff can be courteous and enjoyable making sure that the women are lulled into a sense of safety at an All Woman Lesbian/Bi/Curious/Just-like-Jamming-with-Women- Dance during Pride.

6.   If you can control the weather, make sure it is very hot—that will be easy during Pride in Santa Fe in June because it’s usually quite hot and you can count on the fact that most Pride venues provide free tap water all weekend to keep people from passing out. That is a welcome and thoughtful thing, and many venues in Santa Fe do this year round in places where dancing occurs. Thus you, while setting up your own victimization, should not have a problem getting “free water,” into place, bearing in mind that you paid for the water as your price of admission to the venue.

(By the way Patriarchy, if we had equal status in society and made decent money percentage wise, we might buy more drinks at bars and perhaps start assaulting each other because we’re so drunk. So bartenders and managers start voting to equalize things for women. You will benefit. Terrorizing a woman for needing some water instead of more liquor is so last Tuesday.)

7. Instruct the manager of the venue to make speeches to the women who are seeking water to make them feel bad for not buying more liquor instead and to shame them for being thirsty and/or on a budget.

8. Make sure you do drink over the course of the evening so you can be blamed for being drunk. This is essential. If you don’t drink, then say you did because everyone knows that if a woman has had some alcohol, then everything that ensues afterwards, can be blamed on her: everything from being grabbed very aggressively and threateningly, to being raped. Even murdered. Well she was drunk, says the man, obviously I couldn’t help murdering her. Plus her legs were showing.

Remember drunk women are never raped or assaulted.

9. Again make sure the venue runs out of water, necessitating a request to provide more water in the big jug next to the bar, creating the whole domino effect.

10. Make sure security is trained to not listen to you once the drama goes down, so when the bartender starts screaming “Get her out of here! Get her out of here!” security simply surrounds you, putting their hands on you, even though you are just standing there with your plastic, 6 ounce, empty water cup saying, “He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me up into the bar in a very very angry manner and I simply threw ½ cup of water in his face so he would let go of me because I felt threatened and bewildered by being suddenly and angrily grabbed and almost jerked off my feet.”

You will probably find that you have to repeat yourself three times, and have to raise your voice, because the manager-bartender keeps screaming louder and louder as if he is a hysterical girl who has been bitten by a wild animal suddenly and without warning, even though he grabbed the animals paw and nearly pulled it off.

A POSSIBLE SCENARIO YOU CAN USE TO EFFECTUATE GETTING THROWN OUT OF LESBIAN DANCE BY A BUNCH OF MEN

I have found as a teacher, it is helpful to give scenarios, or examples to students, of various social dynamics and principles. Thus I am providing a step-by-step example of one possible scenario that demonstrates how you can get thrown out of lesbian dance while defending yourself from a hostile man who is grabbing you and being threatening.

Here it is important to get a little backstory about the main female protagonist, so when you go to set up your own victimization you will be fully in character and able to manipulate all the variables to your satisfaction. (Or his satisfaction really, because that’s all that is important.) You have to understand how your life has created the seed such that you are the kind of woman who just asks for men to hit you, for example.

If you don’t understand the woman’s character and possibly deeply troubled past of having a Ph.D. in psychology and teaching in many university and college settings, and being a published writer, as well as her vocational background as a crisis counselor and assistant director running a group home for troubled adolescent girls, and being a lesbian bisexual, with various successful relationships, having good friends all over the United States, and having traveled abroad extensively, and having had many wonderful and illuminating hours being alive, as well as having a well-developed shamanic spiritual practice, that includes helping other people, you will not fully understand how all these events conspired to turn her into the kind of person who gets thrown out of a Lesbian Dance by, not just one man, but four.

Apparently this sordid past, and her tight red dress and education and ability to detect nuance and sexism, all led her down this train wreck of a situation of making a man assault her.

Women are such bitches, aren’t we? We should never be allowed to abort embryos, use birth control, vote in elections, or get an education because then we run around making men grab them inappropriately and scare them when we defend ourselves with ½ a glass of water.

Let’s run through a scenario:

Two women approach the bar, “Could we have two waters please. There is no more water available out here. The big jugs are empty.”

The manager-bartender hands over two waters in 6 ounce plastic cups. He goes and refills the jug at the side of the bar.

The two women, stand at the empty bar, discussing music and literature.

The bartender comes back, frowning and angry, buts into the conversation and says to the women in a hostile tone, “You should know that next time there won’t be water for you. Not anymore. Tomorrow night at our bar you’ll have to buy water. So be grateful that you are getting something for free tonight.”

The manager then stares at the women and then throws things around underneath the bar in a clunky way that sounds like frustration or anger.

The two women stare at him and then at each other. He stalks off to tend to something down at the other end of the bar. Both of them have purchased tickets. Both have purchased other beverages, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic throughout the evening and are thirsty because of dancing. Both are paying customers. Both have regularly patronized the local LGBT establishment in the past and spent plenty of money. Both are women.

The woman in the red dress says to her friend, “What’s that about?”  The shorter woman in pants frowns and says, “Why did he need to say that to us?”

(The next step is crucial.)

When the bartender comes back, the woman in the red dress says to him, “Why did you feel the need to say all that to us about the water?” (Make sure to come from the point of view that being rude to a customer over water is unjustified and that if she were a man, she wouldn’t let that kind of thing go either. What man would really let another man say to him: okay, but that’s all the free water you are getting tonight and you should be grateful. Bad boy. Bad bad boy.)

“What?” says the manager.

“Why did you need to say all that to us about the water. I mean it was kind of rude to say to us in the way you did, like we don’t deserv- ”

The manager then grabs the woman’s left arm that is sitting on the bar and jerks it hard, pulling her off balance in order to shove his face aggressively close to hers and angrily hissing “We spend too much fucking money on water for you women.”

Startled and scared and immediately self-protective, the woman in the red dress throws her cup of water, about 3 ounces because she’d drunk the rest, in the proprietor’s face in order to make him let go of her arm. Immediately the manager starts yelling,

“Get her out of here! Get her out of here! Get her out of here! Get her out of here!”  (Sounds like Donald Trump huh?)

And then one, then two, male security guards come in and without asking her what happened, grabs her arm telling her she has to leave. She says “Let go of me. Don’t touch me. He just assaulted me and grabbed my arm and was totally rude. I threw water in his face to make him let go.”

In the background, the manager, let’s say his name is Doug Nava, for example, is screaming like a girl, “Get her out of here, get her out of here!”

Meanwhile the woman’s friend is saying, “She didn’t do anything. He grabbed her. He was rude to us.”

Two more guards show up and encircle the woman in the red dress who is fiercely arguing her point. “No, he grabbed me. He put his hands on me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I threw the water on him so he’d let go of me. Do not touch me,” she says to the security guard who is trying to grab her arm, of course to escort her out. To his credit the guard let’s go of her arm.

Meanwhile the manager is yelling “She hit me! She hit me,” like the woman is Calamity Jane or something. (If she had been, he would not have been standing up anymore.)

And now her friends are showing up and saying, “Listen to her. Listen to what she is saying.”

The guards are now telling the two original women, plus any of the other women who are coming to her defense, that they all have to leave.

The woman says, “He puts his hands on me at a lesbian dance and you are saying I have to leave.”

Another woman says, “He shoved me earlier tonight when I was-”

And then another woman says, “He was so rude to a friend of mine tonight while she was trying to figure out what line to stand in to buy a drink ticket that she went home.”

One of the guards is saying, “Ma’am if you don’t leave now we are going to have to take you out by force.”

At this point one female security guard shows up, and says, “Yes I hear you, but it’s his venue and he hired the guards so what he says goes.”

The woman in the red dress says, “Oh so even though he assaulted me by grabbing my arm and being threatening, he gets the final say because he hired you.”

She hesitates and nods.

The woman who has been assaulted says, “So the security is about protecting the man who grabbed me in a totally aggressive and intimidating way and not about protecting the women and the paying customers at all.”

She said nothing, but the woman could tell she had made her point.

So at this point six  women surround the woman in the red dress and they all get thrown out of the dance.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! This is how this goal gets achieved! 

Outside the venue, the woman almost goes home and then decides she wants a record of the events, though it will not help her get un-thrown out of the dance, or un-manhandled by Nava, or the security guards, who at least, kept their paws off her when she demands they not touch her. Plus she figures she will need the police report to press charges if she decides to. (She decides not to because “being grabbed, yanked aggressively and angrily hissed at by the manager,” is may not go anywhere in court and she doubts she can corral the other women who have been the victims of his behavior and attitude to go along and it seems like a lot of work. Plus she knows she will likely be dragged through the mud. If he’d actually punched her, she would have gone through with it, but no one punched anyone. Had she actually punched the manager, as he claimed, she would have left marks for the police to take pictures and note. That did not happen. She was careful to not exaggerate about what he did either.)

Plus then she remembers I wanted this to happen. It’s my fault of course for not letting a man put his hands on me aggressively. This is what I set out to do tonight, get thrown out of a lesbian dance by an angry gay man. You’d think a gay man wouldn’t do that to a gay woman…but I’m obviously stupid.

Someone later will explain to the woman that his bar was imploding and he was mad because (theoretically anyway) he hadn’t made enough money that night to cover the costs. (The Blue Rooster will fold 4 months later, no doubt due to people avoiding the venue. Again it will be the woman’s fault.)

Now outside the venue, the woman calls the police and they show up and tell her that the manager has already called them and filed his report which says that she hit him. What a liar. The woman then files her own report, saying that that never happened and she has a witness, who corroborates the truth.

The police are courteous and professional and there is nothing outright to suggest they don’t believe her. They are men too, but many men are good upstanding people. This woman knows many such men, gay, straight and trans.

She files the report in case she needs the information later and to document what happened in case she wants to file charges of assault against him later. She wants her side of the story told. She’s not just going to sit there and take it, not from a man and not from anyone.

Epilogue

Soon the gay partner of the manager shows up and apologizes for what has happened and offers her and her friend free drinks at their bar down the road to which she says, “No thanks.”  He is not patronizing, but apologetic. She accepts his apology and suggests that the manager shouldn’t be managing people or running women’s dances.

The boyfriend (who will later break up with manager) refunds their money and asks her not to take it out on the bar. She agrees to nothing. He admits his partner has an anger problem.

So, Ladies, this is how to get assaulted by a man and thrown out of a Lesbian Dance during Pride celebrations. No doubt you will want to try this on your own! It’s easy to make this happen, apparently, no training is really necessary if you built the right ingredients.

Maybe in 2016 we can have several women being assaulted by straight men too. I am so looking forward to it.

At this junction the woman could congratulate herself on “getting a free dance.” Such manipulation, but all women are manipulative and need help from men to stay in control. Right?

Some of you may question how I know this scenario will work?

Because it’s all true and it happened to me. Minus the part of my setting it all up beforehand. That was irony and sarcasm to make a point: I, and everyone else, gay, lesbian, bi, straight, curious, and trans should be safe at a gay venue. Especially if we are all gay or friends of gays!

This is Laughing Coyote Reporting

Everyone have a safe and enjoyable Pride. Even you Nava. No doubt you have also been mistreated in your life.