The Dan Chronicles

The Dan Chronicles are a daily log of the stupid misogynistic behavior of a guy named Dan who works with my husband Nigel. Nigel is an engineer who designs and fixes industrial lasers for large manufacturing equipment in a machine shop. He shares his environment with an overwhelming male majority. There is one female machinist who is referred to as “that bitch dyke” by all the other men within earshot of her, and the other has been subjected to life-threatening sexual harassment with impunity. The other mere smattering of female employees work as typists and receptionists; they aren’t even hired into sales positions. This is a breeding ground for utter misogyny, the worst of which is a particular insect named Dan.

Dan is a typical blue-collar worker. He’s just your average beer-drinking dood. However, lurking beneath that otherwise benign exterior he is also an example of that frighteningly large percentile of men who think that women are good for nothing but fuckin’ and taking care of him. This makes it difficult to differentiate men like Dan from men who aren’t haters.

I am a radical feminist. In my own individual effort to stop the madness within the social circle I can reach, I’ve encouraged Nigel to express his disapproval of Dan’s behavior whenever it crops up. Perhaps Dan will learn that women are not, in fact, in existence solely to service him, but are real actual whole human beings. Perhaps not. In any case, it’s a bit tricky for Nigel in that environment, because the men there are a tight-knit group and he has to be careful not to alienate them too much for practical reasons of us wanting a paycheck.

However, he does have the advantage of having seniority, being a muscular 6′7″ and having been spent all his life before our relationship in a remote mining community that treated bar brawls as a local sport. These are all things that patriarchal misogynists respect, and so he can get away with treating Dan’s behavior with the contempt that it deserves certainly more than I could. Nigel is a terrific person.

As an ironic result, Dan now follows Nigel around incessantly plying him for his friendship like a pup following the alpha, regardless of how consistently he is set down for his stupidity. Their daily conversations which Nigel shares with me are a source of both hilarity, horror and depressing reality that this man exists and functions in the world with nothing but Nigel’s derision to indicate that his jackwitted ways are anything but perfectly normal.

As a learning exercise and a bit of petty lampooning, I’d decided to start keeping a log of these interactions. Not only do they provide an object lesson for me in my ongoing attempt to subvert the patriarchy, but I think they are a useful specimen of the day-to-day mind of your average misogynist. Feminism is most often only discussed by more academic privileged folks, and though the concept of the problems that exist among the working class are thrown around as a statistic, I thought this anecdotal slice might be — if nothing else — illuminating.

His wife really is the victim in these stories, and I’ve heard enough to make me think seriously about staging an intervention on her behalf. It is very hard to record these stories without wanting to do something more than passively shake my head.

It’s my hope that in reading these, you might laugh, you might recoil in horror, and you might think about speaking up next time you’re in a group and the Dan amongst you reveals himself. It’s only through the things we do everyday that we make a difference.