Her Uterus Is Retired, Her Standards Aren’t

What a hotel bar taught me about the things that come out of people’s mouths

There is a particular kind of pleasure that events people discover by accident and then quietly guard like a secret.

It is not the event itself. It is not the moment the room fills up, or the panel lands, or the canapés arrive looking suspiciously better than they did in the catering deck. It is the forty-five minutes before any of that happens, when you are sitting alone in a hotel lobby or a side-bar or a coffee spot with a good flat white and absolutely nothing to do except exist and wait.

I love these moments with an unreasonable intensity.

My body is technically present. My diary says I am “on site.” But my brain? My brain has left the building entirely and gone rogue.

I sit, I sip, I watch. And I think the most unhinged things about strangers.

She is smiling so much this morning. Not the polite smile. Not the customer service smile. The other one. The one that lives behind the eyes and doesn’t quite switch off. Did she sleep well, or did she sleep spectacularly, and by spectacularly I mean was she absolutely, thoroughly, reverently fucked to within an inch of her life by someone who knew exactly what they were doing and took their time about it?

Did someone spend the night learning her like a second language? Is that why she’s ordering her coffee like the world is fundamentally a good place this morning? I hope so. I genuinely, sincerely hope so. She deserves it. She has great energy and she should be having the time of her life on a regular basis. In fact all women should.

He looks like he has been personally wronged by the concept of Mondays. Not just this Monday. All of them. Every Monday stretching back to childhood, each one a fresh betrayal. Something happened this morning or didn’t happen and he has arrived in this lobby carrying it like a radiator. Leave him alone. Get out of his way. Let the man have his coffee in his grievance in peace.

Adore those heels, they are doing real structural work and I respect it in the way you respect someone free soloing a cliff face. That is engineering. That is commitment. That is a woman who decided this morning that comfort was for other people and she had somewhere to be.

And then him. Over there. The enormous one.

He is moving a luggage cart like it is a toy. Just casually relocating what appears to be significant infrastructure with one hand, completely unbothered, as though the laws of physics apply to everyone else in this lobby. God, how is someone so big? I find myself genuinely curious about the logistics of existing in a body that is six foot plus in all directions.

What is that like? Do you just… know you’re winning every room before you enter it? Do doorframes feel personal?

He is tall in the way that makes the ceiling feel like a suggestion. Broad in the way that makes you wonder what his childhood diet was and whether it’s too late to replicate it.

I am doing maths I did not expect to be doing at this hour. I am blushing, actually. Genuinely blushing, coffee cup halfway to my mouth, because yes, yes I am wondering if the giant has a giant penis.

You know. You absolutely know. Don’t look at me like that. We all do this. Every single one of us sitting in a lobby or a coffee shop or an airport gate, running a completely unhinged internal monologue about the strangers around us that we would never, ever say out loud.

The lobby is free theatre and we are all critics and none of us are innocent and that is completely, perfectly fine.

It is, in fact, one of life’s great unspoken pleasures.

I Want To Be Her

One particular morning I was parked in the side bar of the Hilton in Islington. We had an event running at the Business Design Centre, lovely venue, terrible acoustics, will not be elaborating and the hotel was serving as base camp for delegates and the events team alike.

I had a coffee. I had a corner spot. I had absolutely no intention of doing anything useful.

Two women in their early-to-mid fifties settled in nearby. Both of them impeccably dressed in the way that suggests they have done enough of life’s admin that they can now spend their energy on the genuinely important things, like a coat that actually fits. They were the kind of women who make you think right, that is what confident looks like when it stops caring whether you noticed.

I was not eavesdropping. I was simply a person who was sitting near them and also has functioning ears.

Their conversation moved between work, dating, and the particular genre of exasperation that women of a certain era have earned in full. They were done with older men, it emerged. Done in the way that suggests a careful assessment of the evidence rather than a dramatic pivot. They were discussing, with some enthusiasm and a lot of laughter, their younger guy situations.

I sipped my coffee and thought, when I am fifty I want to be exactly this. Vivacious, funny, utterly unbothered, and apparently having a significantly better time than most people in this room.

Then she said it.

She described a recent moment with the new man she was dating. Everything was going well, very well, by the sounds of it. She paused to put on a condom on her lovers penis.

And he said, but you can’t get pregnant.

I nearly inhaled my flat white.

Let Me Translate That For You

What she was doing, what that single, practical, entirely reasonable action communicated was this:

I like you. I am genuinely enjoying this. Your presence is welcome and so, specifically, is your penis. However, we have been dating for a short period of time and I don’t know your full sexual history, and you don’t know mine, and because I am a grown adult who respects both of us, I am going to put on this condom before we continue.

What he heard, apparently, was:

Please remind me of my own fertility status, as I had momentarily forgotten.

What he said was, in plain translation. You are over fifty. Your reproductive system is no longer commercially viable. Therefore the only reason a condom could possibly exist is to prevent pregnancy. Since that purpose has been neutralised by time, the condom itself is redundant. You’re welcome for this logic.

This man, who was presumably hoping the evening would continue in a positive direction, decided that the correct response to a woman protecting them both from STIs which exist, which are real, which have not heard of the menopause and do not care, was to give her an unsolicited seminar on her own body.

He did not ask. He announced. He explained her to herself, helpfully, in a moment that did not request his input.

Reader, she was not impressed.

And I a stranger in a hotel bar who had no business being as invested as I was, was not impressed either.

Which Brings Me, Inevitably, To The List

That little conversation cracked something open in my brain that I’ve been meaning to address for years. Because it wasn’t just about that particular man or that particular comment. It was about the whole genre. The things people say. The sentences that come out of mouths with such confidence, such ease, such apparent lack of awareness of the grenade they are rolling across the table.

I have a collection.

I have been adding to it for years. It should, at this point, be published as a book. A proper book. Hardback. Maybe a ribbon bookmark. Something you could also use as a weapon if the situation called for it.

I would call it Stupid Things People Say and I would have it distributed to every eighteen year old on the planet along with their first proper hangover and the vague understanding that actions have consequences.

Compulsory reading. No exceptions. You want to exist in polite society? You want to open your mouth in the vicinity of other humans? Great. Read the book first. Take the test. Then we’ll talk. Oh and by the way I do mean all 18 year olds men and women.

These are the things that, if you say them to me, you should know in advance that I will not be processing them calmly. I will be processing them the way I process a wasp appearing directly next to my ear with the full force of my nervous system and none of my manners.

The List

Why don’t you smile more? You’re so pretty, shame to hide that face behind a frown.

There is so much happening in this sentence that I barely know where to start. Let’s begin with the assumption that my face is a problem that needs solving. Then let’s spend a moment with the idea that the solution is smiling, that if I simply rearranged my features into a more decorative configuration, I would be fulfilling my potential.

You are not my face’s director. My face is not a public amenity. It is attached to my head, which is attached to my body, which is currently walking away from you.

Also, the word “pretty” was doing so much work in that sentence. You’re so pretty, which means, of course, that your prettiness is the relevant fact here. Not your thoughts. Not your mood. Not whatever you are actually experiencing that has nothing to do with the person now critiquing your facial output.

Wow, that’s a brave choice, I don’t think I could pull off that outfit.

This one is elegant in its nastiness. It is constructed like a compliment, it contains the word “brave” which sounds like admiration, and yet the message is as clear as a bell.

I would not wear that. The implication is that this reflects well on me.

The genius of it, if you can call anything this petty genius is the deniability. I said you were brave. Yes. You did. The same way people call a terrible haircut “interesting” and a disastrous life decision “bold.”

Brave implies risk. Risk implies potential failure. You just told me I might be failing at my own outfit while technically saying nothing of the sort. Well played. Horrible. Well played.

Oh babe, you look so tired.

I am never tired. I am always fine. And even when I am neither of those things, the correct response from someone who is not my GP, my mother, or my closest friend is absolutely nothing.

You look tired is never actually about tiredness. Tiredness would elicit something useful, like can I get you a coffee or do you need a minute.

You look tired is about having noticed something on my face that you’ve decided to narrate aloud. The face that, as established above, does not require a running commentary.

It also lands differently depending on who says it and in what context. In a morning meeting it means you look rough. From a certain type of person on a certain type of day it means you are not performing attractiveness correctly and I felt you should know.

There are exactly two people on this earth who can say “you look tired” to me and have it received in the spirit intended. You are almost certainly not either of them.

Not ALL men.

Ah. Here we are.

You have arrived, sir, at the conversational equivalent of walking into a hospital during a medical emergency and saying well, not everyone gets sick.

When a woman says something about men, about patterns she has observed, experiences she has had, things she is tired of the not all men response is not a correction. It is a redirection. It moves the conversation from her experience to your feelings about being included in a category. Which is a remarkable piece of footwork, when you think about it.

Nobody said all men. Nobody believes all men. The entire concept of not all men exists to interrupt rather than engage, to make the speaker responsible for soothing the listener rather than finishing the thought.

The house is on fire. Some houses are fine. Please move.

Oh, such a pretty girl, such a shame about being bi.

I’m going to need you to explain the logic here, because I’ve turned it over many times and I still can’t find it.

Being bisexual is a shame because? I have more options? Because my capacity for attraction is not neatly defined by a single category? Because some people find this confusing and have decided, apparently, that their confusion is my loss?

The such a shame format is a particular kind of cruelty because it works hardest when it comes from people who think they’re being kind. They are not being unkind, in their mind they are simply noting that this is unfortunate. They are, in a sense, sad for you. Which is worse than hostility, honestly. Hostility at least acknowledges you as an equal. Pity just looks down.

Being bi is not a waste of my attractiveness, a tragedy for straight men, or a phase. It is simply part of who I am. Not a shame. Not a complication. Not up for analysis over someone else’s flat white.

And Finally. The One That Actually Makes Me Lose My Entire Mind.

Calm down.

CALM DOWN, CALM DOWN FUCKING, FUCK THE FUCKING STUPID FUCKING CALM DOWN

I will not.

I will not calm down.

I will not calm down because calm down is not a request. It has never been a request. It is a weapon dressed in practical clothing. It is a way of saying your emotional state is too large and it is making me uncomfortable and I would like you to make yourself smaller so that I can continue this conversation on my terms.

Calm down is most frequently deployed in the middle of a legitimate grievance. Someone has said or done something that warranted a response, the response arrived, and rather than engaging with the content of the response, rather than sitting with the thing that caused it the listener has decided to appoint themselves the arbiter of the appropriate emotional register.

And here is the thing about being told to calm down, it has never, in the recorded history of the phrase, made a single person calmer. Not once. Not ever. It is physiologically counterproductive. It adds the additional grievance of being told to perform composure at the exact moment composure is least accessible, which is roughly the emotional equivalent of telling someone who has just spilled wine on white upholstery to not stress about it.

You want me calmer? Engage with what I’m actually saying. Listen without preparing your defence. Acknowledge that something happened. These are paths to calm. Calm down is a shortcut that arrives at a destination nobody wanted.

Say it to me and I will not calm down. I will become the opposite of calm. I will become a weather event.

Back to the Hilton

Those two women in Islington finished their coffees, paid their bill, and walked out of the bar still laughing. I didn’t hear the end of the condom story. I hope it ended well. I hope he figured it out, or she decided he wasn’t worth the tutorial.

I sat there a little longer, finished my coffee, watched the lobby continue its silent performance, and thought about all the sentences that get lobbed at women with the breezy confidence of people who have never once had to think about them from the other side.

The condom man probably thought he was being practical. The smile-more man probably thought he was being encouraging. The “brave outfit” woman probably thought she was being honest. The “not all men” man definitely thought he was being fair.

None of them paused, even briefly, to consider what their words actually landed as.

That pause, that half-second of wait, how is this going to arrive? Is not a lot to ask. It is, in fact, the bare minimum of social decency. It is the thing that separates a comment from a small, unnecessary wound.

My events team eventually emerged from their meeting, apologetic and caffeinated. We got up, we got to work, we ran the event.

But those two women. Vivacious, sharp, completely done with mediocrity in all its forms. Fifty and magnificent and handling a fresh idiocy with laughter rather than despair.

That is, genuinely, the dream.

The Career Ms 💋

If any of the above has made you think well actually, please know that you have already answered the question about which category of conversationalist you fall into. Have a lovely day.